This Week in the Lab: The Conversation I Didn't Want to Have
It came out of nowhere. Like these things do.
Wednesday morning. LIVE session. We’re in the middle of a solid room - good energy, people checking in, the format running the way it’s supposed to run. And someone in the chat asks a question that had nothing to do with what we were doing.
They asked: “Do you miss it?”
Just that. No context. But I knew exactly what they were asking.
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ICUC. The company I built for over a decade. Four hundred employees. Social media management at scale, before social media management was a real industry. We were figuring it out in real time, building the infrastructure, making the mistakes, getting it right enough to matter.
Acquired. Fifty million dollars. Canada’s Top 40 Under 40.
And then: done.
I’ve answered questions about the exit before. Cleanly. Professionally. The polished version - what I learned, how it shaped my thinking, what I took into the next chapter. I’m good at that version. I’ve told it enough times that it runs on autopilot.
But this person wasn’t asking about the lessons. They were asking if I missed it.
That’s a different question.
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I paused. Live. On camera. In front of the room.
Not a dramatic pause. Just - a beat longer than normal. The kind where the host is supposed to pivot but instead does the thing hosts aren’t supposed to do, which is actually sit with the question.
And I said: yeah. Sometimes.
Not the work. Not the meetings or the operational weight of a 400-person organization - I don’t miss that. But the thing underneath the work. The sense of scale. The feeling that what you’re building is large enough that its outline is visible from far away.
MiTL Studio is three years old. We’re building something real. I believe in what we’re making. But it’s small right now. Intentionally small, structurally small, because that’s what this phase demands.
Some mornings that’s fine. Some mornings it’s not.
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I didn’t plan to say any of that.
That’s what the room does. The MiTL format is built around accountability and honesty - you bring what’s real, you don’t perform what’s convenient. We hold each other to that standard with everyone in the room. I can’t ask that of the community and then soft-serve my own stuff when I’m on camera.
But I’ll be honest about what I felt in that moment: resistance.
Not because the question was hostile. Because I knew the real answer would pull me somewhere I don’t usually go on camera. The exit is a story I’ve packaged. The thing underneath the exit - the identity piece, the recalibration of what “success” means when the scoreboard you built your whole sense of self around gets zeroed out - that’s not packaged. That’s still live.
And LIVE means it can still hurt a little. That’s how you know it’s real.
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Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since Wednesday.
There’s a version of rebuilding after a major exit that looks like moving on. Clean narrative, clear lessons, new chapter. I’ve seen founders do it. I’ve done it myself in certain rooms. You put a bow on the last thing and you talk about the new thing with appropriate enthusiasm and nobody ever has to see the seam.
That version is a lie. Not a malicious lie. A protective one.
The real version is messier. The real version is: I built something that defined me for a long time, and then I sold it, and then I had to figure out who I was when the thing I was known for wasn’t mine anymore. And that process doesn’t complete neatly. It doesn’t have a graduation ceremony. You just gradually notice that you’ve rebuilt a sense of self that doesn’t depend on the scoreboard you lost.
I’m further along than I was two years ago. I’m not at the finish line because there is no finish line.
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What I didn’t expect was the response from the room.
After I answered, three people - on camera, live - started talking about their own versions of this. Not startups. Not exits. But the same thing underneath: the identity that gets tangled up in a role or a title or a company, and then what happens when that thing changes or ends.
This is what I mean when I say the MiTL room is different.
The format creates the conditions for real conversation by having the host be real first. Not performed vulnerability - that’s its own kind of manipulation. Just: I said something true, in the moment, without buffering it through the polished version, and the room responded with its own truth.
That’s not an accident. That’s format design.
When you build a morning show where accountability is structural - where you’re not performing your way through a topic but actually checking in about what’s real - the conversations that happen aren’t the conversations you planned. They’re better. And sometimes harder.
Wednesday was both.
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Week 2. Here’s where I am.
The identity theme for this week turned out to be less theoretical than I expected. I thought we’d be talking about the exit in the Sunday newsletter sense - here’s what I learned, here’s the framework. Instead the room handed me the live version. The one that doesn’t have a clean ending yet.
I’m not going to wrap that in a lesson.
Some weeks the lab produces a finding. Some weeks the lab just runs the experiment and you don’t know what you have until later.
This was a later week.
See you Sunday.
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