Well Twitter can't ship product, and many people within Twitter blame @jack. See for eg that article about the woman who setup their original abuse proceedures. Plenty of quotes in that which show how he stops anything getting fixed.
Maybe Musk might be a better example.
Musk took over Tesla in 2008, which was two years later than Twitter was founded.
In that time Twitter has:
Stopped crashing all the time
Increased the Tweet size from 140 characters to 280 characters.
(2) serial entrepreneurs are _more successful_ than parallel ones for the most part.
a) I've done well when you consider revenue/global brand reach/spread
b) I've spoken informally to trusted board members nobody seems to have clarity on the best way forward
c) Option 7 seems to be the best way out
d) on point number 9, yes I'm distracted, but I've understated how much thought has gone into the second idea; it's something that's constantly come up when I'm with my customers with whom I have a remarkably intimate relationship with. I live for them and this one issue keeps coming up. I have toyed with the idea of getting someone else to build it, but it requires some industry good will, customers willing to pilot it etc and so far that rests with me. I meet with my customers on a fairly frequent basis to figure out where their general pain points are, what their industry vertical trends are and what other issues I can solve for them (typically this involves an introduction to one industry vendor/company or another). In the course of these conversations you can unearth a lot.
To use a theoretical example. I will use Square. If in the the process of meetings with customers in say retail figures out that nobody has built for purposes of this conversation a CRM that addresses their needs and it's a pain point that keeps coming up in every single conversation with retail customers what would you do? Over several conversations you have industry members nagging you for a solution because over time you have become their trusted advisor.
In your shoes I would analyze myself first before making a decision: are you just good as a starter or are you able to go the distance? And then to recognize that most of the value creation happens early on in the life cycle of a company but most of the value capture happens later on. So if you exit early you will financially hurt yourself.
You're right that POS is the #1 pain point retailers have, even though you used it only as an example.
I bring this up because the problem is not what you'd think it is.
You can't just "build another one and they will come", because each different business who might be a customer has slightly different needs and wishes to implement the software in a different manner.
For clarity's sake, we run 8 retail stores, and since I have a background in software my partner wanted me to build a POS, since none of them on the market met our needs. I know enough to stay far away from that gig, though, because it's a rabbit hole of custom engineering.
I don't know what your business is or what people have asked you to build, but if it's anything like what I described above, you'd essentially be downgrading yourself from "funded software company CEO" to "paid consultant."
And even if you think you can sell it with minimal modifications to other customers, you better be 101% sure of that before jumping off this cliff.
beware
This fellow is running a successful business with investors backing it, and yet rather than stay to make it bigger and better he’s ready to throw it all away based off a couple passing conversations he had with some customers. There may have been a time where he felt just as strongly about this business as he does for his new idea.
If his new venture doesn’t take off he’ll be another one of the ambitious failures that litter Silicon Valley looking for the “next opportunity”.
If it does take off, there is still no guarantee he won’t jump ship to some new idea later, especially now that he has done it successfully at least once.
If he stays at his company, he can consistently work to improve it everyday, until it becomes something that can’t be built overnight by some entrepreneur flying by the seat of his pants.
The choice is his.
Oh! I get it now, thanks. Also, this reminds me of a FS article I read: https://www.fs.blog/2018/03/speed-velocity/
Note: FS is an excellent blog!
(2) serial entrepreneurs are more common than parallel ones
(3) don't you have a performance requirement with your investors?
(4) does your shareholder agreement allow any of this?
(5) have you talked this over with your investors?
(6) it all depends on the cap table
(7) you could always sell your stake in the current company or engineer an MBO
(8) doing another company underneath the current one will still require buy-in of shareholders
(9) you already seem distracted
(10) a word of advice: finish what you start
Best of luck!