Loom
Vinay Hiremath is grappling with one of success's unexpected downsides.
The 32-year-old cofounded Loom, a video communication company that was acquired by Australian software company Atlassian in October 2023 for about $975 million.
In a recent blog on his website, the former chief technology officer of Loom wrote about giving up $60 million in pay when he decided not to work for Atlassian. Instead, he said he briefly evaluated building a robotics company and climbed two Himalayan peaks. Hiremath also worked for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Department of Government Efficiency for a month.
"I started to realize that, although the mission of DOGE is extremely important, it wasn't the most important thing I needed to focus on with urgency for myself," he wrote. "I needed to get back to ambiguity, focus on my insecurities, and be ok with that for a while. DOGE wasn't going to fix that."
Hiremath, who broke up with his long-term girlfriend, also wrote about the challenges of tying his identity to his startup.
"When we went through our first round of layoffs, this company my ego was hitched to had suffered a massive blow, so I lost myself. This whole chapter of Loom has created a complex web of internalized insecurities I must now work hard to disentangle and free myself from."
His co-founder, Joe Thomas, remains CEO.
A Wednesday X post in which Hiremath shared a link to his blog has been viewed nearly 540,000 times. The post garnered over 500 comments, many from other tech enthusiasts and startup founders thanking Hiremath for opening up.
Hiremath wrote he is in Hawaii, learning physics and aiming to start another company "that manufactures real-world things" — even if he doesn't find as much success as he did at Loom.
And he's wrestling with philosophical questions about his identity and how he relates to others.
Hiremath did not respond to a request for further comment.
Hiremath is part of a wider community of suddenly wealthy people or early retirees who struggle to find purpose after decades of working. Experts in personal finance say the feeling is common.
"When we have more money than we could ever spend, most people quit their job — but the job provides many of us with structure, a sense of purpose, and a great deal of our social interaction. Remove this, and it leaves a big void," Robert Pagliarini, a financial advisor who wrote a book about sudden wealth, previously told Business Insider.
Clayton Christensen, an academic and business consultant best known for his theory of "disruptive innovation" and his views on purpose, long said that focusing on a purpose is essential for personal and professional success.
The Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Business School alumnus, who died in 2020, wrote that he had to "think long and hard" about his purpose.
"Over the years I've watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I've seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children," Christensen wrote in a 2010 Harvard Business Review article. "They didn't keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy."
