The Next Thing

There's a small moment I keep coming back to.

It was 2015 (so barely a year into AppTweak) when I asked Olivier, our CEO: "Okay, once we ship this next feature, then what are we gonna do next?"

He laughed. Not in a mean way. It was more the laugh of someone who knew something I didn't yet - that there is no "then what." There's always a next feature. A next hire. A next market. The question itself was the naive part.

I didn't get it at the time. I do now (and we still laugh about it).

For the twelve years that followed, I always knew what I was chasing. You kind of see the whole chessboard - you know that once you open one office you'll want the second, that the team of one becomes two, then four, then a whole org with managers, that you'll need a better CRM and you'll need RevOps and a clear way to split new business from existing, and automations, and career paths, and more, and more. You look at the bigger companies, and you want a team like that. So you fight for it. You close the big deals to earn the resources to build the next thing. And it genuinely never ends - which, when you love it, is the best part.

Then, almost without noticing, I built it.

Four VPs. An organization running across three continents. The revenue organization I'd been imagining back in 2014, when I was employee number one and it was just me. I moved home to Brussels from San Francisco and kept catching myself describing my own life out loud: "I'm the CRO. I manage four VPs. I'm in charge of the revenue." And somewhere in hearing myself say it, it landed - I'd actually built the thing I set out to build. I became the person I would have looked up to twelve years ago.

I want to be honest about something, because the tidy version of this story would skip it: I wanted that. I didn't climb for twelve years by accident. I wanted the organization, the title, the recognition, the US business, the resources. I wanted to be able to say I'd made it. And yes, I wanted to make good money doing it. The achievement wasn't a trap I fell into - it was the thing I worked incredibly hard for.

And I did feel proud when I got there. I felt satisfied. I felt like I'd done what I set out to do.

But then, slowly, I stopped wanting to be there.

Not because anything was wrong. The clients were happy and renewing, the people were extraordinary, the company still had years of growth ahead of it, and there were plenty of exciting projects on the horizon. But I felt finished. Like I'd given what I had to give. And I realized I wasn't curious about what came next anymore.

I need speed. I need to feel my impact directly. I need to be close to the action. I need things to be a little messy. I like figuring things out as we go. I like building where there isn't really a playbook yet. I like feeling that what I do today can change what happens tomorrow.

So I left. And I won't pretend it was clean. Walking away from something you spent twelve years building is hard in a way that's difficult to explain, and for a while afterwards I landed in a kind of nothingness. For twelve years my ambition and the company's had been the same thing - I'd organized my whole identity around building it - and when that was gone, I had to sit with a question I'd honestly never asked: what does my ambition even want, when it isn't pointed at someone else's company?

I've never thought about it that way before. It's less "I reached the top and wanted a bigger mountain," and more: I'd been climbing one mountain so completely, for so long, that I'd never stopped to ask what I wanted to climb next - for myself.

I'm not going to hand you a neat lesson, because I'm still in the middle of this. And I've realized that introspection isn't always linear. But maybe that's the thing I'm slowly learning about my own ambition: it doesn't disappear when you reach something. It just starts, quietly, looking for somewhere else to go.

So here's where I actually am. I have some freedom, some time, a lot of energy, a good network. I could build almost anything. And for the first time in twelve years, no one is handing me the next objective. I have to choose it myself. Maybe it's the angel investing I've just started. Maybe it's the AI business I'm thinking about. Maybe it's the mentoring/coaching. Maybe it's all of them - maybe it's something I haven't found yet.

I don't know where this ambition will take me next.

I'm excited to find out.

Have you ever gotten the thing you thought you wanted, only to find yourself wondering, "What's next?" I'd love to hear about it.

See you next Friday, -Laurie 🤍