In a start-up’s early days everyone works tirelessly, but everyone is friendly and happy. Things get rocky at two points: when things go terribly, or when things go really well. As business started taking off at Liquidnet—as revenues started to shoot up—some board members began taking more responsibility for our success. In other words, a few people started getting greedy.

Some of the board members approached me about wanting a larger piece of the pie. Specifically, my piece of the pie. Until that point, our board meetings were very constructive and cordial. As we were ramping up, the directors were patient and reassuring. But now that it was clear the company was going to be successful, they wanted a larger stake. I’m sure they felt they deserved it—and that, with some threats and bullying, I would give it to them. They were wrong. There was nothing in our agreement that entitled them to additional stock. I knew I would never go back on terms of an agreement that we had all agreed to and signed. I would never hand over my equity.

They didn’t take it very well to say the least. At one point there were threats to resign.

Retrading of deals happens all the time on Wall Street, but to me the attempt to intimidate me into relinquishing equity in the company I had built was nothing short of blackmail and extortion. If I were less confident of my position or if I had less equity in the company, I could have been forced out. Anyone who reads the financial press knows there’s no shortage of stories about CEOs being booted out by activist investors. I was able to stay at the company I founded because I had solid agreements in place, majority control, and 100 percent conviction that I was doing the right thing.

The fact was that these board members really had no basis for their demands. I don’t think the board expected me to stand up to them, but that was their mistake. When negotiating, you have to stake out your final position. Once you take that stance, the faster you say no, the faster you will know if you have a deal. In this case my first stand was my final stand. It was hard and there was certainly a downside to holding firm. But the company was clearly starting to take off, and I didn’t think they would want to miss out on our success.

This could have been a major distraction, and it could have torn the company apart. We were still in a very vulnerable stage; if news got out that the board resigned, it would have completely undermined our standing. The board members knew that; it was their leverage. But I knew that this one chip would hurt them, too—they were investors, and they would see a positive return only if we succeeded. So, while I couldn’t know for sure, I thought they had a lousy hand and that they were bluffing. I played my hand, which I believed was much better.

Choose Your Board Members Wisely

Early on, we enlisted a bigwig from a major bank to help us figure out “clearing,” the procedure that would enable us to settle all trades between the transacting parties. This guy was huge in the hedge fund world and a pioneer in the clearing business. We thought he’d be a great board member to advise us on clearing firms, pricing, and other issues critical to back-office functions. He would also be a great asset when we eventually moved to include hedge funds in our member base.

That’s what we thought, but that’s not what happened. This was a new problem for us. He joined the board, which added prestige, but he didn’t do anything that we asked him to do. I was disappointed and surprised by his lack of commitment to the company. While I was a bit concerned about hiring and then firing a board member, everyone was working so hard to start and build this company, I had to expect the same from our board members. Having a less-than-productive employee destroys the morale of everyone who works with that person. I believe the same of board members. I asked him to leave. He was very insulted. I learned that there are a lot of people who want to be on boards for the money, the equity, or the prestige, but they don’t want to do the work.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last mistake I made with board members. Later, we hired another board member who had a very promising track record. The problem was that she agreed with everything I said. That was encouraging at first, and in a way it was nice to have such support, but ultimately, this constant concordance added no value. I needed someone who would challenge me.

Another time, we were trying to extend our reach into Silicon Valley. After an extensive search, we arrived on a great candidate who had been chief financial officer of a prestigious venture capital firm and had many connections into firms in the Valley. He joined us and went through the company orientation before the board meeting. I told him I would be going to Silicon Valley in four months and asked for his help arranging meetings with venture capitalists and private equity companies. As the trip was getting closer—only one month away—nothing had yet been set up. I reminded him that I needed those meetings. By the time of my trip he hadn’t set up a single meeting. We parted ways right after.

Everyone has to be accountable to the same rule: if they do not perform, they have to go—as soon as possible.

Becoming Relevant

With the board drama behind us we could focus again on managing the business, which was growing very quickly. We were starting to benefit from just staying in business. We were gaining more members, more word-of-mouth business, executing more transactions—and having more successes.

Think about the first time you went to eBay. You probably didn’t buy a car, right? Maybe you found the rare coin you were looking for to round out your collection, an American Girl doll for your daughter, or a pink monkey suit for an upcoming party, but chances are your first foray to eBay was not a big purchase.

The same was true with our Liquidnet members. In the beginning, members were using our platform for decent-size transactions, but they were not as big as they could be and they were not happening as frequently as they could have or, from our perspective, should have.

We saw a huge opportunity to grow with the customers we had. We found it would take anywhere from six months to a year for the traders to be completely comfortable executing on our platform and for Liquidnet to become part of their everyday workflow. But the longer they stayed with us, the more volume they did. Individual usage (the equivalent of same-store sales) went up 20 to 30 percent year over year. It was clear: the longer members were using us, the more volume they did through us. Therefore, we had to do everything in our power to keep them and grow their business with us. With the constant addition of new members and growth in existing member usage, Liquidnet grew 70 percent from year 1 to year 2, 108 percent from year 2 to year 3, and another 108 percent from year 3 to year 4. By the end of year 4, we had over $100 million in revenue and were valued at well over $1 billion.

We believed that once we were averaging 20 million shares a day, we would become meaningful and relevant to the market and an important source of liquidity to our members. We set that target, and once we reached it, we saw that more firms started signing up. It took about four years, but that was the tipping point, and ultimately, with the growth in our daily volumes, we were able to bring the biggest prospects on board. Liquidity begets liquidity and growth begets growth.

Welcome New Members

We were now signing up the largest long-only asset management firms that managed pension funds and mutual funds. We knew however that in order to achieve the next level of growth, we needed to expand our customer base. Many long-only asset management firms had the same view on the stocks they were buying and selling, which meant they bought and sold many of the same stocks at the same time. We always thought opening the platform to certain hedge funds would be the path to adding a lot more liquidity and opportunities for our members to trade and would be the next stage of our growth. Hedge funds were more contrarian than the long-only managers and, therefore, tended to buy when the long-only firms were selling and sell when the long-only firms were buying. The problem was, our members had been certain—and very vocal—about one thing: They didn’t want hedge funds included in the Liquidnet pool. Hedge funds in general had acquired a bad reputation and our community was fearful of them, thinking of hedge funds as “smarter money” that would take advantage of the data in the marketplace and use the information against them.

But we knew that not all hedge funds were bad and those members’ views were based more on emotion than fact. All hedge funds are not day traders, and many hedge funds had grown large enough to have the same liquidity problems as the long-only funds. Furthermore, an efficient market needs buyers and sellers and a variety of participants. The primary business of mutual fund managers is “long only,” meaning they don’t short stocks that they think are terrible investments. Hedge funds invest in the stocks of companies they believe will increase in value (going long) and sell the stocks of companies they believe will decline (going short). By playing both sides of the market, hedge funds are generally better “contras” to the long-only managers. And even though hedge funds were a very small percent of institutionally managed assets, they did an outsized share of the trading in the market. The problem we had to solve was how to convince our current members that bringing on certain hedge funds would be beneficial to them.

As always, we went to the advisory board with this issue. We had to convince members that not all hedge funds were bad, and in fact they were able to provide more liquidity. We stressed that hedge funds were an important part of the investment community, and in order to continue to build our liquidity and value to our community, we needed to include them.

It was incumbent upon us to make the argument and to prove to them as best we could why it made sense to open the platform to hedge funds. We had lots of data and we used the data to prove why excluding hedge funds was a bad strategy for the rest of the members. Asset management firms registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have to report their holdings every quarter. While the information wasn’t exact, we could tell what was bought and sold by the firms within the quarter by comparing the holdings between quarters. We then broke out the hedge funds from the long-only funds to show the potential matches had those hedge funds been in the community. The data was very compelling.

Once we proved the additional potential liquidity that could be available to them, to further placate their worries we worked with the advisory board to create a list of criteria that hedge funds needed to meet to be included in our community. With the advisory board’s thoughts and buy-in, it made convincing everyone else easier. But ultimately we still gave our members control. We offered the ability to opt out or block trading with hedge funds to all of our members. As a further measure, we required all hedge fund members sign an addendum agreeing that they did not engage in a certain kind of trading.

There was a bit of elitism and a lot of concern leading up to the inclusion of hedge funds, but once they were on the platform, it turned out to be drama free: Very few of our members opted out of trading with hedge funds, and the hedge funds exhibited better behavior than many of the long-only funds! Even more important, our theory was right: adding a whole new constituent turbo-charged our volumes.

When Everyone Hates You

The very idea for Liquidnet was to create a wholesale market for institutions to be able to trade in the large size they needed to execute their orders. Making the institutional market more efficient would increase the returns of all the people who invested their pensions and savings with these asset managers. When we started, it felt like computers and the Internet had completely bypassed the institutional asset management business.

The retail side of investing told a different story. Charles Schwab, E-Trade, and others had put excellent technology and data into the hands of the retail trader. If individuals wanted to trade a stock, they could pull up a tremendous amount of information about that stock, and if they wanted to buy or sell a stock, they could enter and execute that order electronically almost instantly.

But if an institutional trader wanted to buy or sell a block of stock, the only way they could execute it was through a human being. Since there were few to no blocks available on the stock exchanges, the only way to execute a block was to call a trader at a brokerage firm, who would then make calls to other asset management firms to see if they could find a seller.

This was a needle-in-the-haystack exercise that generally ended up having a single-digit probability of finding a match and a very high incidence of information leakage. There are many types of investors and traders in the market, and some of them profit on taking advantage of this information. Knowing that there is a large buyer or seller in the market is the same as knowing there’s a supply or demand imbalance. It’s Economics 101: If there is more demand than supply, the price goes up. Knowing that, those traders could start buying ahead of that institution and the price would start rising. If no block was found, the broker put the order into an algorithm that sliced the larger order into tiny pieces to get them executed on the exchange—putting more demand pressure on the stock.

To improve on that, we created technology to centralize the block liquidity, solve the supply and demand imbalance by matching size with size, and eliminate the phone calling and information leakage. The result was larger executions at better prices for both parties and the disintermediation of the human sales trader. The result? Increasingly happy members and a lot of unhappy competitors who weren’t thrilled about losing their once-essential and highly profitable role.

The way they saw it, our offering would change the balance of power in the industry, ruin their equity business, and threaten their livelihoods. Until that point, the only way an asset manager could access liquidity was through a broker. That had been an incredibly lucrative business model. Furthermore, until we came along, there were two stock exchanges—Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange—that executed the majority of all trading. With everyone accessing the same liquidity, there was very little differentiation between the brokers’ execution capabilities. A trader could give his or her order to any broker—and he or she could pretty much expect the same execution quality. (Sometimes the larger brokers committed capital to execute their customers’ larger orders, which was a differentiating factor, but it was done on only a small percentage of overall orders.)

When Liquidnet came around, since it was for asset management firms only, for the first time the buy-side had access to more liquidity than the brokers did and in a much more efficient model. The near monopolistic access the brokers had to liquidity was broken, and the traditional reasons for using brokers to access liquidity began to fade.

Brokers didn’t take this lightly because they risked losing tremendous amounts of money in commissions. Traders at the asset management firms paid billions of dollars a year in commissions to their brokers for what was, for the most part, a highly undifferentiated service, so how did the brokers win their business? Relationships built by providing the services of their firms and bought via dinners, sports events, and more.

The trading desks of mutual funds were supposed to execute orders with whichever brokerage firms offered the best price and service—not the ones that had the best box to the basketball game. However, a lot of business was built around evenings at sports events or steak houses.

Repaying these events became a routine business practice. Having a great night at a game or concert made it easy for a trader to go back the next day and give that broker a large order that could translate to thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in commissions. The trader’s job was to execute their orders, and since every broker executed at the same places, there wasn’t much difference in execution quality between the firms, so frequently it just came down to relationships.

Like many things Wall Street related, the relationship building got out of hand. The excesses came to a crashing end a few years later when some traders at one of the largest asset managers had a debauched bachelor party in Miami funded by their brokers. Different Wall Street firms supplied private jets, escorts, and some other over-the-top items. It was all reported on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. A long-time investigation discovered that taking gifts—such as tickets, cigar-filled humidors, escorts, and drugs—had been happening at some of these firms for years. The firm settled with the SEC for a hefty sum and the industry largely got rid of all that kind of crap.

We did help to change the industry by creating a unique block-only, institutional liquidity pool that provided a very different service from what could be found on the exchanges and a reason beyond relationships to use us. We helped to shift the balance of power from brokers to asset managers by providing access to only asset managers, which put more power and control over the execution into the hands of our members. Execution by way of relationships gave way to execution to achieve the best results for their investors. These changes made me very unpopular among a very large part of Wall Street.

Once when I went to the New York Stock Exchange to do a TV interview with CNBC, our public relations person was in the crowd and overheard a conversation about me. “Who’s that guy?” a broker asked another broker pointing my way. “That’s the Antichrist,” the other answered.

Cultivating Friends

But while one side hated us, the buy-side traders enjoyed their emancipation from the brokers. We wanted to ensure that membership in Liquidnet had its privileges, and we began thinking of ways to deliver that. We started hosting conferences just for our members to meet and talk to their peers. We hosted speakers from inside and outside of the industry and moderated discussions around topics like how the role of the trader would evolve, how that role could become more important as the industry transformed, and how the industry was changing. We focused a lot on their changing role, which was becoming more complicated and necessary as they took more control over their executions. We also framed it the way we saw it, and in a way that they loved. This is the “Golden Age of the buy-side trader,” we explained.

It resonated. The buy side, for the most part, had no love lost with the traditional brokers. They knew they had been at the mercy of brokers and had been taken advantage of for a very long time. There were always those traders who had their favorite brokers who gave them the best tickets to the best shows, but for many it had been very much an adversarial relationship.

Many of our members embraced the opportunity to take more control and adopt something that would give them a competitive advantage over the brokers and the other buy-side firms not using us. It created differentiation in the performance of their funds, which made them look smart to the portfolio managers. And it made us win not just their business but their hearts and minds.

As the role of the traders at asset management firms evolved, it became clear to us that there was no training provided by their firms to help them grow into their new roles. The typical training program for a new trader was to sit next to a seasoned trader and do what they did. Portfolio managers, on the other hand, generally had to have qualifications. They had to have an MBA, CFA (a very difficult set of three tests they have to pass to become a Chartered Financial Analyst), or some other educational background to be hired. We decided that would be a great service we could provide to head traders and created a three-part training program for our members called Headway.

Headway, the brainchild of Jeff Schwartzman, head of our internal learning and development group, Liquidnet University, was not designed to teach traders how to trade. Rather, it was intended to expand their minds about what is possible in their career; how to present their ideas more effectively; how to manage their teams; how to better communicate with their customers, the portfolio managers; and general management training to help them become more important to their firms.

The first part is a three-day intensive program that is half presentation by instructors and half role-play by the participants. The second part is a multiyear coaching and mentoring experience where our instructors coach the participants through real-life scenarios using the tools learned in Part 1. The third part is a two-day intensive course that goes deeper into the skills learned in Part 1 and practiced in Part 2. The classes were sparse at first, as again no one had ever offered this kind of training to them. Even free, we were asking traders to take three days out of their schedule, so this was something we had to do extremely well. We spent a lot of time interviewing traders, getting their ideas, validating and revalidating the topics, and then the instructors spent untold hours rehearsing their parts before we delivered the first class.

We have consistently received rave reviews from everyone that has participated in Headway. Very unexpectedly, I’ve received e-mails and letters from some of the spouses of the graduates saying that it changed their lives or even helped their marriages. Over the years, Headway has built an international reputation among our community with many traders who received big promotions, attributing the promotion in part to participating in the program. Today, half or more of the participants in the course come from Asia, Australia, and all over Europe.

This program has no explicit return on investment and is a large cost to us to deliver. It is, however, a great example of membership privilege, and by offering a service that helps the careers of our customers, it creates a special relationship with our members that no other broker has. There are, of course, commercial benefits as well: In addition to trading on our platform, our members spend a lot of time with us sharing their ideas or validating ours. When we launch new products, our members tend to give us the benefit of the doubt and try them.

Don’t Just Catch Up—Leapfrog

One of the tenets of Liquidnet I’m devoted to is that we live speed. Even before we launched in the United States, we planned our foray overseas. London was calling! It took Goldman Sachs 100 years before they opened their first international office. We did it in one.

If we thought the institutional market in the United States was behind the times, it seemed light-years ahead of Europe. Brokers still took the traders out to lunch and drank pints until they were drunk. A very, very old boys network still controlled the industry. Everyone was aware of these factors: we were warned that there was no way that we were going to break into the old boys network.

I didn’t heed that warning. I didn’t take it seriously, either. One of our strategies was to go global faster than anyone else had. We knew our U.S. members traded European equities, so we came calling with access to a unique liquidity pool in the United States and a good amount of European liquidity. “We come bearing gifts,” I said. We believed there had to be enough traders in Europe that would want access to our unique liquidity for us to be successful.

After the first handful of London- and Scotland-based firms signed up, one of them came back to us and said that we could not tell anybody that they were a Liquidnet customer. We wouldn’t anyway—we adhered to strict confidentiality clauses—but we asked them why they were coming to us with this now. They told us: “The major brokers have called everyone on the buy side and said, ‘if you get on Liquidnet, we will not provide any capital to you; we’re going to cut you off.’”

Generally, it’s not good business practice to threaten your customers, and it’s shocking for vendors to tell their customers what to do, and yet this is a true story. We didn’t let it derail us. We stayed focused on our work. We just signed up more clients who were willing to take the risk, and soon there was too much liquidity for others to ignore us. Our success shifted the power away from those bullies and into the hands of our members.

Walk Away

In the four years since going live, Liquidnet was growing incredibly quickly, generating tremendous profits, and was valued at $1.8 billion. We had begun issuing dividends in the second year of operations because we were making so much more money than we could spend. In 2005, we decided rather than go public we would provide a way for our early investors and employees to take some money off the table. We lined up a couple of private equity firms to buy $250 million of shareholders’ stock at a $1.8 billion valuation.

Every firm we approached wanted to do the deal. It was too big a deal for one firm, so we chose two, Summit Partners in Boston and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) based in Palo Alto.

I wore a purple shirt to the first meeting, which received a lot of comments. I ordinarily wouldn’t remember this fact, except everyone from the TCV team came to our second meeting wearing a purple button-down. The point is that if you are a sought-after company, there is a courting period where the firms who want to invest in you will tell you and do just about anything to win your favor. This little detail, I have to admit was very cute and curried some favor.

We came to an agreement on the initial term sheet very quickly, using a negotiation strategy invented at Liquidnet, which we previously mentioned called 3×3. It was based on my experience role-playing with my Dad when I was negotiating the sale of Merrin Financial. It’s used when we negotiate any contract, agreement, partnership, or anything else where the desired outcome would be important for our business. It’s the planning, prepping, and role-playing that we do in advance, and it greatly increases the odds of a successful outcome. It’s called 3×3 because we anticipate three possible responses from our counterpart to our proposal and prepare our best responses to each. We do that for three back-and-forths.

If we do our jobs well, we will have correctly anticipated their arguments and role-played our well-prepared responses to their unrehearsed, on-the-fly responses. We laser focus our responses on getting to the end goal, away from any tangents, minor issues, or argumentative statements that don’t move us closer to the end goal. If successful, we will have achieved a successful outcome within the three back-and-forths. And in this case, it worked perfectly. We got what we wanted in terms of valuation and type of security they would be buying.

After the main points up for negotiation were agreed upon, then came the brass knuckle negotiations over the finer points. With the price and valuation set, we had to agree on the governance structure and what veto rights on certain operations the private equity firms would have control over. We scheduled a full-day meeting to determine these, and both firms came to the office on the day of Christmas Eve. The TCV folks had flown across the country and sacrificed spending Christmas Eve with their families to get this deal done. There were about 20 of us locked in a conference room for the entire day going over every detail. After we had been at it for most of the day and there were still some major sticking points, I asked the heads of both firms to come into my office with me to see if we could close the deal just between us. We hoped that just between us we would be able to hammer out the rest of the agreement quickly. Two hours later, we could not agree on the final points.

We walked back into the conference room at about 6 P.M. “There’s no deal,” I said. They had all been sweating it out, waiting for hours for word that we had a deal. You could feel their hearts drop. Their personal commitment and sacrifice to getting this deal done was for naught.

“Let’s get some beers,” I said.

I told them I enjoyed the process and meeting them, and we hung out drinking beers for a bit before going our separate ways. Of course, I was disappointed. I knew there would be a lot of Liquidnet folks who would be severely bummed out.

But I also thought there was some chance they would come around. We were close enough that I thought it would be silly for them to walk away. I also thought the points of contention were more important to me than to them, so I believed I had to walk away from the table in order to get the deal done.

A few days later, while I was away for the winter vacation, which of course was on the ski slopes, I got a call. Once again, the call disrupting a ski holiday was a good thing. They wanted to move ahead.

It was certainly risky to walk away when we were so close. In any deal or strategy, you have to hope for the best but plan for the worst. The terms I held out for turned out to be extremely important to Liquidnet in the coming years. It also helped that the company did not need the money, so this deal was an extremely nice-to-have but not need-to-have deal.

To this day, I believe Summit and TCV came back to the table in part because we were all very gracious and shared some beers at the end. Investors must like your business model, but they are paying for the past and investing in the future of that business, which really means they are investing in the company’s management. Ending a very long and contentious day on a nice note showed them something about the ethos of the company and made me someone they felt they wanted to work with. I think we showed our true colors in the face of adversity (we were not bitter or angry), and the fact that there was beer in the fridge endeared them to us.

It Was the Best of Times

We became one of the fastest-growing companies in America. We were number 5 on Inc.’s list of the fastest-growing private companies in 2004. We were making so much money that we were able to issue dividends every quarter. Investors couldn’t believe how lucky they were to have stumbled into this. Between the dividends and the $250 million of stock that shareholders sold, within eight years of our founding, we had returned $450 million to shareholders on a total investment of $29 million. It seemed we could do no wrong. Our investors and employees had hit the jackpot. I was loving life.

Apparently, so was everyone else. Exactly nine months after we closed the round, an incredible baby boom swept the company. There seemed to be a new birth announcement every day. We had around 30 babies born at that time, which was a large percentage of our workforce. There were so many babies born to Liquidnet employees that two of the babies were given the exact same first and middle names. (In case you’re wondering: Maya Rose.) It seemed that we had run out of names for babies.

Some companies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Salesforce—seem to keep on growing, but examples of consistent exponential growth are few and far between. They exist only because companies have figured out how to deftly navigate the S curve, determining their next move while they were still far from their peak.

We, too, had to manage our S curve. We knew that our growth and business model would not go unnoticed, and once we had proven that our business model worked, others would copy us. ITG, the firm the analyst predicted we’d put out of business our second day of operation, finally caught on to the advantages of our model and reacted. They had lost significant market share to us, and they understood they had to make some significant changes to compete.

They started reengineering their service over a few years and then launched it to compete with ours. But that wasn’t all. The New York Stock Exchange came out with new products, Nasdaq launched two offerings, and virtually every exchange around the world unveiled something they promised would compete with us.

This was new. We’d spent most of our existence disrupting the status quo and educating the markets on our new model to our sole benefit. Now, many others were joining the bandwagon and were competing in our space. What to do?

We took a close look at our business and data and discovered we had opportunities for our members in only 30 percent of the orders traded. That meant that for 70 percent of the orders that we captured, there was nothing we could do for them. They had to go to our competitors to execute the majority of their orders. It was a lot of business to leave on the table. We had to provide new services that expanded our opportunity to execute some percentage of 100 percent of their orders.

ITG, while it lost business to us in the block-trading market, was an early pioneer and had a very large business in all types of electronic execution. We had to add other services and access to all the market’s liquidity if we wanted to expand our opportunity across all of our members’ orders. It would also solve a somewhat embarrassing problem. While we were the best in the world at electronically executing 1 million shares of a stock, if they had 500 shares left, we only had the ability to execute it manually. To gain the expertise we did not have internally and to speed our time to market, we decided to make our first acquisition. We purchased an algorithmic trading company called Miletus.

It was a smart move, but like every acquisition, there were some issues; it turned out that some of the technology that they were building and we sorely needed was much further from completion than they had represented. We had to hire a lot of developers to supplement their team, which significantly increased the cost of the acquisition and delayed our time to market.

But it worked. We integrated it into Liquidnet and grew it to $70 million in revenue within a couple of years. The acquisition allowed us to expand our opportunity set, sell additional services, deliver a more complete offering to our members, and fuel our growth.

Every quarter was a record quarter. It seemed like every day we were putting $1 million in the bank. I wasn’t surprised at our success—finally achieved. I always believed this was a better mousetrap. And, even at this point, I was certain that we had still only scratched the surface.

But that hubris didn’t allow me to see potential issues. All of the success masked a lot of underlying problems. I soon learned that when you have the feeling that nothing can go wrong is exactly when everything can go wrong.