Exits, Experiments, and a Phone Call in June
Pages from Corporate Life
There’s a particular kind of confidence that made me hand in a resignation on a Monday morning after a decade.
It came from the previous Friday. An end-of-year review that went sideways. Not in a way where the door was shown, but in a way that told me the direction ahead had been set.
What I didn’t know then, and only found out years later: my manager at the time had plans for me. That information arrived in 2018. The resignation was in 2013.
As a family, 2011 was a tough year. Father’s health declining slowly, then quickly. Diagnosed late April. Gone by mid-June. A hospital room where a work call happened anyway. He overheard. Asked, for the first time, what exactly it was I did all day. I tried to explain. He seemed satisfied.
The years outside were instructive. A startup with a persuasive founder. Another one incubated at a prestigious institution, where the product was still theoretical and the salary was more so. I was employee number six. Traveled extensively on my own dime. I believed in the upside. The share certificate still exists, in 2026.
Meanwhile, the company I had left announced a voluntary separation program. The broader context was a company navigating its own transition — out of public markets, into a private ownership. With a stated belief that the share price had never reflected the real worth. The timing of all of it had its own comment.
The lesson from those years isn’t the obvious one about startups or stability. It’s simpler: knowing what you’re good at doesn’t protect you from situations designed to waste it. The exits weren’t failures of skill. They were failures of fit, and sometimes, of luck.
The call came on an ordinary June 2015 evening, during a family prayer that happens around the same time every year since 2011. Someone had put in a word. The door was open again.
I walked back in. One level higher than when I left.
The grade they had once withheld had quietly corrected itself.
This is the second piece in Pages from Corporate Life. The first — The Newbie in the Room — covers 2002–2008.