The CEO email arrived on a Monday noon. I read it twice, and he spoke to me over lunch. He was out. Very little explanation from our parent company, the objective was cost reduction.
Three months earlier, we'd celebrated our biggest year, a 6x growth of revenue and users on the electromaps app. We were growing, firing on all cylinders. Users were coming, also to our SaaS software for charging station owners. By most internal measures, we were winning.
First, with little notice, our marketing budget cut from $3M to almost nothing. Then my manager left. After him, I was newly reporting to the services head of the parent company. The new bosses didn't understand our business, made little effort towards it. In 6 months, my new boss was gone too.
Before I knew it, I've had four managers in two years. Each time I told myself: this is the bottom. It has to get better now.
It didn't.
Here's the thing that took me too a while to understand. You can be doing everything right and still be get pulled under. We weren't failing. The parent company that had acquired us was. Their struggle became our ceiling. The work we were doing mattered less. Our team became a number on a spreadsheet they could cut.
The way I eventually got through it came down to a few things I had to force myself to actually believe, not just say:
1. Separate what you control from what you measure yourself by
I kept working hard because I believed it mattered. But I stopped expecting outcomes I genuinely couldn't deliver. I practiced being radically honest with my team and with myself about what was possible was the only thing that kept trust intact. Giving false hope costs more than hard truth.
2. Don't confuse loyalty with passivity
I chose to stay. It was my decision, and not a failure to escape. But staying meant I wanted to do something useful with the time, not just weathering it. I carved out hours to learn, to build something on the side. In the last two years, I have built applications, and found a renewed interest in math and deep learning.
3. Protect the work, not the institution
The company was struggling. The work, the clients and the service we deliver still mattered. I found a way to mentally separate them out. My team got my best even when I couldn't give them certainty about what came next. That distinction kept me out of cynicism, mostly.
4. Let four managers in two years teach you something
Each one had different priorities, different fears, different ways of working. I got good at adapting fast, at communicating up without attachment to outcome, at building relationships that survived the churn. That was real skill. I didn't think of it that way while living the experience.
I got through it. But I want to be honest: it cost something.
It's been a slow drain. I've been running on adrenaline and willpower longer than I've known before. The question I still sit with is not whether I made the right calls. I think I did. It's whether "getting through it" is actually the win I keep treating it as. It's becoming hard to distinguish between survival and growth.