我解散團隊後，把協助每位成員找到新工作變成全職工作

At my last startup, Intract, we raised $3 million and grew to about 80 people. I ran product and engineering, so a lot of them reported to me.

They were good at their jobs. I learned from them and they learned from me. I looked forward to going to the office every day, not for the work, but to see them and talk. Somewhere along the way they stopped being my team and became my friends.

Then Intract stopped working. We had to make the decision every founder dreads, and we let most of the team go.

I've had a lot of hard days as a founder. That one was different. These were people who had trusted us with their careers, and we were sending them into a job market that wasn't kind.

Taking on the job search

There were three of us founders. Between us, I took on one job: make sure every single person got placed.

That became my full-time work. I sat with each person and rewrote their resume. We went through job boards together and picked roles. We worked out how to apply so that someone actually replied. I asked everyone I knew for referrals at other companies.

It took a while, and it wasn't always pretty. But in the end everyone got placed, many of them at great companies. It's one of the things I'm proudest of, and nothing to do with any product I've shipped.

What I didn't expect

I went in thinking job hunting was an operational problem. Find the right roles, fix the resume, apply well, follow up. A checklist. And it is that.

But the thing I wasn't ready for was how emotional it is.

Most of the time, nobody replies. You send out applications you spent hours on and get silence. Not a no. Nothing. And you wake up the next day and do it again, and it's silence again. I watched talented, confident people get a little quieter every week. They hadn't got worse. The silence wears you down whether you deserve it or not.

The operational part and the emotional part are tangled. Every application that disappears into nothing makes the next one harder to send. Every reply, even a rejection, gives you a bit of energy back.

What I decided

I knew I couldn't fix the emotional part for millions of people. That's a friend's job, a family's job, a good manager's job.

But I could fix more of the operational part than I'd thought. And if the operational part works, if the right roles show up, if applications go out early and get replies, a lot of the emotional weight lifts on its own. Replies were the best medicine I saw.

Then I saw something bigger

While I was doing this, I noticed the market itself changing under us. The jobs my team was applying for already looked different from the ones they'd been hired into a few years earlier. New titles were appearing. Old ones were quietly asking for skills nobody had trained them on.

I think the next few years bring the biggest change to work that most of us will see, and most people aren't prepared. It's not only that some jobs disappear. The jobs that grow look different, ask for different things, and are found in different places.

So when I started my next company, I wanted to build the thing I wished I'd had back then: a tool that helps people move into better roles, including the new ones AI is creating. It finds the jobs that fit you, applies early so you actually hear back, and helps you get ready for roles you've never done before. It's called landed.

If you're in it right now

If you're job hunting and it's been silence for weeks, here's what I learned from that time:

The silence is not a verdict on you. Most applications are never read by a person. That's a numbers problem, not a you problem.
Apply early. Roles get most of their attention in the first days. A good application on day one beats a perfect one on day ten.
Ask for referrals without shame. People like helping, and most of them remember being where you are.
Track the work, not the replies. You control how many good applications you send. You don't control who answers. Measure yourself on the first.
Don't do it alone. Have someone to talk to every few days. It doesn't need to be a coach. It needs to be someone.

It worked out for my team. It can work out for you too.