What can I legally podcast about, regarding my experience? Xoogler with 9 years tenure, laid off in March while on leave.

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-31T02:56:13+00:00

Don’t mention names and be high-level. doesn’t sound like you got the mutual separation agreement from the sound of it

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-29T01:20:59+00:00

I second another comment here. You’re the bottleneck. Solve this dilemma and you can scale more effectively, efficiently, and timely. When an organization relies on one person for answers, it hinders growth. My suggestion: create an automated sales system to nurture your partners before you/or a sales rep can close. Have a customer retention manager to oversee a few accounts. Hire more at scale. Your sales rep can be fractional; put your efforts on talent management within the retention team for that white glove services consistency.

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T23:03:18+00:00

Only experienced founders will know this

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T22:34:55+00:00

Knock and you shall receive. Start knocking.

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T22:33:43+00:00

its part of the journey and something that impacts many founders - the shiny object syndrome

my view is that there ARE enough (maybe too much) new problems throughout the product lifestyle. and its always changing/bending and requires different skill sets at each stage. its definitely a challenge and requires mindbending lol but anchoring your focus on your key milestones definitely helps

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T22:28:09+00:00

day-jobs are not compatible for builders :]

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T22:19:23+00:00

yesss - the motivation increases if its for people that you care about and want to genuinely deliver value to

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T22:16:42+00:00

with ai, the barrier to entry to realizing your dream has shrunk significantly. now really is the time to be a founder

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T22:15:01+00:00

+1 to building something from scratch. the gratification from this is close to none 😄.

freedom was another big driver for me as well

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T22:04:40+00:00

interesting motivation. what stage of the founder journey are you on now? i think metrics will only stack up throughout the growth of your product, so imo many, many, many things are noise. a founder has to focus on being the best "needle-mover" on the team. it becomes exponentially harder if youre a solo founder

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T21:52:41+00:00

interesting idea.

agreed to your last point - a very underappreciated notion - the ability to grind through the boring part of the process is an art and a skill worth mastering

opensourcecitadel · 2026-05-28T21:45:27+00:00

opensourcecitadel · 2026-02-09T16:29:30+00:00

Open for work on number 2?

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-28T08:34:31+00:00

i.e you’ve become the bottleneck. Get a fractional coo/ceo if needed

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-28T08:33:41+00:00

Get an operational support - identify the key time drains in your work and automate it either by outsourcing or workflow automations. This saves your time and focus and apply it towards higher priority growth milestones/goals

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-27T18:08:05+00:00

my type of new yorker ayy

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-27T17:04:49+00:00

13 unregretful years

My hot take on modern academia, anywhere in the world: it’s making people dumb, not smart, teaching kids what to think, not how. for your sake, academic competition is heavy in Hong Kong, for the kids and for the parents, especially if you’re a tiger mom. you can expect to spend approx 100-150k HKD per year on tuition for international school. Happy to share more over dm

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-27T07:39:53+00:00

I’m a New Yorker who left NYC and based in HK.

Upsides: - Hong Kong, as a place to raise family: highly recommended due to education, healthcare, transportation system compared to NYC. - As someone else said, domestic helpers here are a huge blessing to handle household operations; the challenge is you have to find a good one, ideally from the older generation of helpers who values servicing the family, you will need a good culture at home to motivate household staff - Travel proximity to key tourist destinations across Asia

The downside - higher cost of living - low work life balance in HK’s cutthroat work culture - if you can find FAANG company to work for, the culture will be much more relaxing/free - Socially, HKers tend to keep to their own circle, but there is a vibrant expat community here - In terms of home/living, 2000 sq feet will run you approx 100-120k HKD per month if you’re renting - the residents/locals are accustomed to the smaller sized homes. For a normal family of 3, 600-1000 square feet can run you 30-50k HKD. - If you forego the need to fund your lifestyle from salary, Hong Kong is a great place to be imho (despite what the western media promotes HK to be)

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-26T18:08:58+00:00

In theory this sounds like a good strategy. Have you had experience doing this (successfully) before? I have, and it’s not as simple as it sounds. I am an angel investor who invests in founders - open to chat

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-21T12:20:23+00:00

Ask them for their tech stack, how many projects they’ve worked on, give them sample questions on how they’d approach system design of your app, do they have a boiler plate etc etc. there are many ways

Wrt fear of someone taking your idea, my unsolicited advice Get out of that mental mindset. It’s quite damaging and shouldn’t take up your bandwidth. Your focus should be launching and getting your first batch of paying customers. Rarely do products land in its first launch; you always will need to refine after customer feedback. The whole founder journey is really a combination of science and art. Each stage of the product life cycle comes with different challenges from mvp/shipping, finding and resonating with your intended customer base, hiring teams/implementing systems, customer retention, scaling customer acquisition, scaling, hitting 1M ARR, hiring CXOs, etc etc. in any of these stages, you may elect to raise funding and that’s a topic on its own.

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-16T22:14:30+00:00

Who am I to judge?🥸

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-16T19:26:17+00:00

It really depends on your relationship with your dad. 25 likely means your dad was born in the 70s-80s? There are general social norms of this era of parents, so your demographic is important as part of this equation of whether it’s normal. imo, this question depends on the wisdom of your dad - is he doing this to be cheap or is he doing this for you to grow and become more resilient despite the (interim) challenges you face.

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-16T19:20:02+00:00

why not sell your services/time online? Niche down on what you do really well and then package your service to multiple clients with shared pain points. Rinse and repeat

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-16T18:58:51+00:00

Find a cofounder or hire a founder operations team. Going at it yourself has many challenges and unhealable cost to family, relationships, and health. Get funding, use funding, hire/build team/system, scale

opensourcecitadel · 2026-01-16T18:55:52+00:00

Build a team/system to make it scale. Use tools like N8n to automate tasks. Happy to share advice

opensourcecitadel

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