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But the pattern he describes maps pretty well to my companies. As a Technician, I started a company focused around building what I loved to build (good software). To a certain point, it's easy for N co-founders to keep juggling all the balls that comprise running a business (rather than just writing code). This is the "Infancy Phase," and all was well, just as he describes.

It was the "Adolescent Phase" of the business where everything fell apart. All the various things we were juggling became too much, and they started to fall by the wayside. In my specific companies, I think a big cause of this was trying to do too much in terms of product.

And so I followed one of the paths he predicts--I threw my hands up, and started small again with a new company. The revelation that did it was pretty much exactly what he writes:

    You realize something you've avoided all these years...
    You don't own a business--you own a job... the worst job in the world!
    You can't close it when you want to... You can't leave it when you want to...
    You can't sell it when you want to, because who wants to buy a job?