Everything Changes After Lift

As someone who has run a company for a decade, there are several meaningful inflection points:

* Becoming cash flow positive (aka Lift) is wonderful and stress relieving.

* Becoming profitable enough to start hiring lots of people and building a team culture marks a sea change in how you must think about your company and how you spend your time.

* Switching from growing to shrinking (albeit still profitable) changes the company culture, as everyone now feels like they're rats on a sinking ship. It's amazing how much people react to directional changes over absolute amounts (i.e., a company with $100K in annual revenue that doubled from last year is more positive than one with $20M that shrank by 20%).

Incredibly timely for me as my company has achieved lift and we are transitioning to the next phase. I am a hacker so my temptation is to sit and hack on things, but that is not what a company needs after it reaches lift, as you say. It's a great learning experience though, and a chance to grow out of your comfort zone.

To stretch the airplane analogy some more, it's interesting to think about how breaking contact with the ground allows you to accelerate faster, because you're no longer spending any thrust to overcome rotational friction of wheels on runway. It can all go into increasing your velocity.

Maybe the startup analogue is getting enough people or money in place that you as a founder can avoid the day-to-day distractions of running the business and focus.