Why I Declared LinkedIn Bankruptcy

When stopped caring about numbers and focused on people

I clearly remember the day I looked at my screen and said, “Fuck it”.

I had been going for weeks on four hours of sleep a night. Some nights I just didn’t sleep at all. It was a mad dash to get a highly customized demo put together for a global bank, one where 85 managing directors and senior VP’s would be in attendance to decide if they would choose our platform. We had twelve working days from receiving the scenarios to the day we would present.

The presentation was a huge success and eventually a few months later we closed the largest deal for the quarter. All I could think of though after the demo was sleep, which I did for fourteen hours. When I got into the office the next day, I opened my laptop, launched Outlook, and looked down in horror.

I purposefully focused only on emails from the demo and product teams supporting the customization and coding work. After reading a few of the latest emails, I did what any rational person would do in that predicament. I deleted my Inbox, cleared the email trash can, and took the day off.

Over the coming weeks, people would email me to follow up on one of the 1,647 unread emails. But for the most part, nothing terrible happened. No one yelled, projects didn’t blow up, the world kept spinning.

I learned two important lessons from that experience. One, email sucks. Two, if you let the…