When Reality Caught Up with Us
There is an old saying:
"Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan."
I do not know whether that is always true. What I do know is that a moment comes when a company becomes so large and complex that it is impossible for one person to continue overseeing every part of it completely. That is exactly what happened with Piramedia. In the beginning, I personally followed every detail.
But over time, that became impossible. There were too many projects. Too many meetings. Too many people. On one hand, it proved that we had grown. On the other, it meant I had to learn to entrust responsibilities to others. Perhaps that was one of the most difficult lessons of all. Not because I thought other people were not doing their jobs well. Quite the opposite.
I had the privilege of working with competent and dedicated people. But no one ever looks at a company through exactly the same eyes as the person who built it. Each person sees another part of the same reality. My eyes were always turned toward the long term. Toward what Piramedia might become in five or ten years. Others rightly had to concern themselves with the daily challenges. The invoices.
The deliveries. Software development. Technical problems. Deadlines. Both ways of thinking were necessary. But from time to time, they inevitably collided. Not because of ill intent, but simply because each person looked at the company through the responsibility he or she carried. I also began to understand that innovation has a price.
When you choose new roads, there is no manual. No one can tell you with certainty which decision is right. You learn as you move forward. Sometimes through success.
But just as often through mistakes. Today, I am not ashamed of the mistakes I made. Quite the opposite. Anyone who never makes a mistake has probably never tried to create something truly new.
During my life, I made decisions I might perhaps make differently if I were considering them today. I accept full responsibility for them. But I never knowingly acted with the intention of harming anyone. Every decision arose from the same conviction: we could build a company that would help people move forward. That distinction is important to me. The price we paid was not only financial.
I also began to feel physically how much energy it demanded from me. The days grew longer. The nights shorter. Even when I was home, my mind continued working. During dinner, I was still thinking about an afternoon meeting. When I went to bed, I searched for solutions to problems that, by the next morning, would already have given way to new ones. Dorina noticed, of course. She knew me better than anyone.
More than once, she lovingly reminded me that I also needed to think of myself. But most of the time, I did not. Because I truly believed the company needed me. Only much later did I understand that leadership also means learning to let a company function without trying to carry everything yourself. I would not want the reader to think those years consisted only of difficulties. Quite the opposite. We continued to laugh.
We continued celebrating our small victories. A satisfied customer. A successful presentation. A new idea that finally worked. Those were the moments that restored our courage each time. Perhaps that is precisely why none of us understood how close we were drawing to our limits. We continued looking toward the horizon. And because of that, we did not see how close we had come to the edge. Life rarely warns us with screaming sirens.
Far more often, it whispers. An appointment that does not take place. A project that takes longer than expected. An investment that costs more than anticipated. A promise that proves harder to keep than we thought. Taken separately, they are only small setbacks. But when they accumulate, they slowly begin to alter the course of a company. That is exactly what happened to us. Not in one week. Not even in one month.
But step by step. While we continued believing that we were building the future, reality was slowly beginning to catch up with us. We were not yet fully aware of it. And yet we stood on the threshold of decisions that would change not only our company. They would also change our lives forever.