Why Code School CEO Greg Pollack left the company

In January 2015, Pluralsight acquired the Code School online programming learning platform. Ten months after that, the purchased company decided to leave its founder, Greg Pollack. He reported this to the leadership of Pluralsight - CEO Aaron Skafard and CFO Greg Woodward. And now, a year later, Pollak explained his decision to the general public on his blog .

Someone thinks that if the founder left the company, then either after the takeover, things went worse, or he wanted to sell it in order to immediately proceed to the next startup. In the case of Pollak both hypotheses are not true. At first, he did not plan to leave.
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“Code School today is an amazing place where real professionals work, extremely passionate about what they do: people who enjoy helping others learn new technologies,” Greg writes.

According to him, Pluralsight is also a great team of managers, the board of directors and investors - these are the people who will lead the company to even greater success. They work with Code School as an independent business unit.

“Before deciding on a takeover, we considered three options for the development of events,” says Pollack:

1. Continue to develop the business yourself.

Code School has always grown slowly and progressively. No other was foreseen.

2. Search for strategic investors that could help scale up.

It was necessary to increase the audience from 5 million to 50. We needed more experienced partners. In addition, we never had a board of directors. This made it possible to create it.

3. Search for a buyer - a company that we could fit in well.

The reason for leaving Pollack considers the fall of his motivation. He realized this by August 2015 — that is, nine months after the takeover. He wanted to create content as before. Instead, we had to perform purely “managerial” functions of the general director all day long. He is tired of endless meetings and nascent bureaucracy.

Greg wanted to return to the times when the Code School project was still a small startup, when the path from the idea to its implementation could be passed very quickly.

Therefore, Pollack decided to return to the work that brings him the most satisfaction. “A little suffering from delusions of control, I don’t like it when they limit my creativity, I don’t like that I now have a boss,” he explains. Therefore, Pollack decided that within the framework of the new organization (Pluralsight - Code School) he could not find a place for himself.

He spoke to several friends who are also CEOs. They gave him some tips on how to best break off cooperation with Pluralsight. “I was very nervous about how this news would be received. Probably, I haven’t been so nervous for about 5 years already, ”Greg writes. “I know how much it hurts when talented people leave the company. This causes a sense of loss. And so I caused the same pain to those who risked a lot by buying my company. They trusted me, but I did not live up to their trust. ”

Tips from Greg Pollack

• The best time to find a potential buyer is right before you get the investment. Otherwise, it will be in the interests of investors to take over your company with an estimate 10 times higher than the current one.

• If you want to leave the company you founded or take another place in it, know: this is possible, and you can do it. It is best to contact a corporate psychologist in such cases.

• Keeping some information secret (for example, plans to leave) from the majority of team members is sometimes the right decision. This contradicted my internal values ​​and the values ​​of the team, but it still turned out to be the right thing to do. You can leave the company as consciously as you created it.