Getting fired is a formative experience, which is why I’m writing this. It is also an emotional experience, which is why you should take what I say here as my opinion, my truth, not the truth. In the end, it takes two to tango, and I certainly played my part in creating my premature exit from Crunchyroll. If I were to summarize what happened in once sentence, however, I’d say this:

“I picked a fight with inertia, and I lost.”

State Of The Company:

Crunchyroll, when they hired me in October of 2014, was going through an identity transition [read: crisis]. For 6 years, they had been a small start-up of under 50 people, all passionate anime fans building a streaming service for the content they loved. It might not have been a humongous niche, but they owned it. Then, in early 2014, Crunchyroll received a $100M investment from The Churnin Group and AT&T. And these big institutional investors essentially gave Crunchyroll a mandate to “Be More”.

So, obligingly, they tripled in size to ~150 by the time I started. They imported an entire department from another streaming company. They made new hires into first-time executives. They hired a new C-layer from outside the company. They bought CreativeBug, another video streaming company. And I walked into this flurry of activity as a contract recruiter, tasked with creating a story to show potential candidates: something BIG is happening!

Even though I didn’t plan on being a recruiter for very long, I still wanted to be good at my job, so I began to try to unpack what exactly we were rushing so quickly to achieve. As I began to ask around my first few weeks, my intuition started screaming alarm bells in my mind: nobody actually knows! Being in HR, I got a front row seat to the intangible effects of this ambiguity: low morale, attrition, political turf wars, all while productivity stalled. It was like watching a $100M sports car doing high speed donuts near the edge of a cliff, with hundreds of people hanging on for dear life inside but nobody trying to drive.

I couldn’t just sit and watch.

State Of Me

I decided to treat the situation as a learning experience. As a contract recruiter, I had about as little authority as anybody at the company. But, that didn’t mean I couldn’t have influence. So, I began a campaign of experiments to push myself, and push my company, in hopes that beyond the boundaries of our comfort zones lay some form of resolution.

I tried the public mechanisms, standing up at all-hands meetings seeking clarity. At first, I just wanted to give senior leadership an opportunity to articulate what they needed to say, but maybe were too busy to realize they weren’t. I knew what vision sounded like, I had had it as a founder, so I would carefully craft the questions I knew would give a leader's vision a chance to shine. Soon, I began to suspect that the problem wasn’t poor communication, but the lack of anything substantive to be communicated. So, I gave up on all-hands for a time.

I tried privately approaching executives. I asked EAs to put me on schedules, asked senior members of my department to seek answers, sent emails directly, eventually got face to face time, and was generally a pain in everyone’s ass. Behind closed doors, I was honest in giving my opinion that we were putting Band-Aids on fundamental identity questions, but optimistic that it wasn’t too late to address these identity questions head on. And, painfully, slowly, I began to gather insight into why they weren’t.

I tried going grass-roots. I met with members of other departments, trying to see if they saw what I saw, and what ideas they had for solutions. I pitched ideas for how we could break down the silos separating departments so we could address these fundamental identity questions ourselves, and actually have something substantive to discuss with senior leadership.

I wasn’t oblivious to the tightrope I was walking. In fact, a couple months in I admitted to a coworker that one of two things was bound to happen: either the company would admit there was a serious problem with the current status quo, or the force of inertia would push me out in order to maintain the status quo. And, most importantly, either option was best for both of us. Yet despite that admission, heading into my final weeks at Crunchyroll, I was actually pretty optimistic that I was balancing the honey and the spice just right with senior leadership. That just wasn’t who I should have been worried about...

State Of My Department

My biggest miscalculation was understanding the landscape of my own department. I was very good at the tactical day to day of my job, and even better at the strategic aspects that were above my pay-grade but extremely useful to the department. Therefore, I assumed that whatever I did with my time outside my departmental duties was more or less above reproach.

Unfortunately, my department was also of that “hanging on for dear life” mentality, and sometimes the best method of survival is avoiding any negative attention. If you have ever seen the show Silicon Valley on HBO, there’s a scene where the Hooli CEO is getting updates from a series of employees, all of which are positive. Then, we see each employee ask the person below them on the org chart to please tell the CEO the truth, which is that the shit is about to hit the proverbial fan. Nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news. Our department was like that (in my opinion), except we didn’t even bother to ask someone else to do it.

I was willing to risk my own job in order to change the status quo. But, my department perceived that I turning them into the “bearer of bad news” by association, and that I therefore threatened their survival as well. At least, that is my opinion. I was blindsided by a one-on-one meeting where I was asked to clean out my desk within the hour not because I was bad at my job, but because “I was putting myself before the team".

I’ve been told that when someone is accusing you of something, it is often really an indictment of something they are subconsciously insecure about in themselves. “Selfish” was probably a more apt label for my department’s actions than my own. Yet, I certainly made mistakes. As soon as I sensed that my department wasn’t willing to walk with me, I went around them. No matter how valid my reasons, I shouldn’t have expected that to go over well. I was a consistent realist in rooms filled with optimists, which probably made me hard to be around if you were just trying to clock in and clock out without too much fanfare. When you are playing with fire, though, you can’t always predict which direction the burn will come from. That doesn’t diminish the value of trying.

What I Learned

I learned to trust my instincts, and trust my evaluation of what is being said no matter how “experienced” the source. That isn’t really something I could learn as a founder where I was the alpha and omega of decision-making for an army of four. Crunchyroll, with its $100M, its executives from the likes of Google and Amazon, its huge institutional investors, and its hundreds of employees was a much larger playing field than I had ever been on. But as we say in basketball, the hoop is 10ft everywhere. If you have the talent to score at an elite level, that doesn’t go away just because the players are older or because there's more people in the stands. At Crunchyroll, I learned that when it came to business instincts I could hang with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

I learned how to take a firing with grace. I was far from happy about it, but I looked people in the eye and told them I accepted their decision (and more importantly said nothing else). Even in this post, I have done my best to be objective in my self-reflection. It was 8 months ago, and most of the faces I knew well are no longer there, and just like I’ve learned since then, I’m sure Crunchyroll has too. This post isn’t an indictment of Crunchyroll, just an exploration of a past experience. Hopefully, if anyone from Crunchyroll reads this, they will take it that way as well.

I learned to translate my instincts into business arguments while navigating corporate politics. Once again, this wasn’t even something I could attempt to learn as an early-stage founder. And, the fact was, I was successful having influence without authority. In my third week I spoke up at the all-hands to say that we were hiring too fast, and by my 3rd month there was a hiring freeze. In my last months, I spoke behind closed doors about the need for a corporate narrative that explained in simple terms what we were trying to accomplish. A few weeks later, “corporate narrative” was listed on the executive to-do list. Correlation isn’t causation, but it’s safe to say my voice was heard. No one ever told me that my insights were wrong or inconsequential, even if my department questioned my motivation for giving them.

And here I am 8 months later, hired to help answer the fundamental identity questions of a video streaming product. I was fired for going beyond my place to help answer those same questions for Crunchyroll, itself a video streaming product.

I think they call that irony.