Monkey Inferno's Failed Perks

A story about how Shaan Puri left his CEO position at Monkey Inferno after realizing he was continuing only due to inertia rather than conviction.

"I was at Monkey Inferno at the time, and to the outside what I was doing was the greatest job ever. We had literally the nicest office you've ever been to in your life - a billionaire built his dream office and we just got to use it. There was a chef every day, a gym, but it was only for the 15 people we had there.

The job was: 'Shaan, you get to come up with any idea you want, here's a team of super talented engineers to build them and designers, here's the funding - you never have to raise funding. You get paid salary and you own the equity. You don't have to focus on one thing, do four at a time.'

At 24 that was the greatest opportunity ever. At 25 it was incredible. Then I was 29 and still doing the same thing, except now with the pressure of succeeding. We took a lot of shots on goal and made some good things happen but no big huge win.

One night at 2 AM in a Chinese casino, my friend asked me 'What are you doing?' I defended it saying it was amazing, but he asked: 'If you weren't already working on this project, if it folded tomorrow, would you call these same people to work on the same idea?' My answer was: 'Same people - hell no, not the same idea.'

We drove to our office at 2:30 AM, went to the whiteboard and said we'd spend the next hour trying to figure out if we could actually make this company work. If we didn't see a plan we believed in, I'd sell the company. At the end of that hour, we looked at it and realized these were all just random long shots we couldn't have conviction in.

The next day I talked to our main investor and said 'I think it's time to shake it up. This is all beautiful, this is amazing, I can't believe you gave me this experience, but I don't want this anymore. Let's either sell the company or you should replace me - something's got to change.'"