Mashup of a gallant kind

What would you do if you realize despite your celebrity status and fantastic track record, you’ve hit the dead end in a startup that looks up to you for advice and pays you well ? Excuse yourself citing other pressing commitments ? Or would you just keep wandering into the unknown `hoping’ for some godsend lead hating to let go off the retainer ?

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If you were Jeff Nolan, you would go straight ahead and admit that you’ve run out of gas. Here’s what Jeff had to say on why he did what he did.

“Teqlo is a fantastic concept and a potentially very disruptive business but it became clear that it needs more time in the oven in order to further develop and, more importantly, package the service. Spending 6+ more months in development before re-entering the market is not what I want to be doing, and as the single most expensive employee in the company it really doesn’t make much sense to be paying me when 2 additional engineers would do the company far more in the way of value creation.”

Humility, Honesty and Chivalry – all rolled into one ! Very unusual qualities for a one time VC. May be that’s exactly why he has those :)

Incidentally, this is the same Jeff who said this while departing VC business for taking on operational reins earlier -

“I missed having direct operational control and I missed the sense of accomplishment that comes from successfully executing direct operational control, and quite honestly, all of the venture deals I was looking at started to look the same. I missed having a team. I was also concerned that my experience in operating roles in enterprise software was becoming dated and perhaps not as relevant to the state that the business is in today; it's one thing to spend 4 hours in a board meeting talking about a business, it's another thing altogether to actually do it”.

Very, very rare breed indeed.

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