I was catching up with a friend once and he told me that he just had one of the toughest months of his life. He fired one of his co-founders which led to an embroiled legal battle, and shortly after that one of his top sales leaders left the company to join a competitor.

It took moving heaven and earth to come out on top. But he did it, and he called this period of his journey his "crucible moment".

A crucible moment, he explained, is the toughest part of a founder's journey where they will feel like they are walking through flames. The experience is so tough it will break you down completely. But in return, you will be rebuilt into someone that can take on any challenge ahead.

What I imagined when he described this was a sword being forged in the blast furnace.

As I listened closely to his story and all the details, I couldn't help but wonder when my crucible moment would come and what it would look like.

A few months later, I found it. January 2025 was my crucible moment. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life, and I came out feeling like a new person - capable of all things.

A wake up call

In November 2024, Helena and I had our weekly Sunday 1-1 on the grass at the edge of Golden Gate Park. I don't remember exactly how the conversation unfolded, but halfway through the message was clear - she needed more from me.

Some of it was feedback, and some of it was just observations about what wasn't working. For better or for worse, I took all of it very personally. And by that I don't mean getting defensive. It was the opposite - it was radical ownership over these shared problems and thinking deeply about what I could have done differently.

This led to a very reflective December. I spent a lot of it ripping myself apart, and learned that I have a fierce inner critic. Seeing other founders celebrating their end-of-year wins made me turn inwards even more.

Finally I wrote a doc over the holidays that captured the things I learned in 2024. December was hard, but I knew it would only be the start. It was time to get our shit together.

Founder mode

When I came back to SF, I was determined to tackle our biggest problems head on. My biggest focuses at the time were:

• There was no feedback loop around our core product. We spent most of the 2nd half of 2024 on moonshoot AI projects to automate internal tasks, but we had completely neglected our core product that customers were paying us for.
• Product ownership was too decentralized, leading to a fragmented platform experience. We needed a central author with a strong vision for how things are going to come together.
• We were letting ourselves slip on our goals with no real consequences. There were different reasons every time, but they were really just excuses and we were starting to internalize this identify of a company that just can't get it done.
• For me: spending too much time on IC work and not enough time developing and coaching team members. It was time to transition my identity from the person who can build anything to the person who can coach anyone.

I sat down with Helena and made a proposal to try a completely new structure for day-to-day operations.

• How we were organized -> In 2024, we largely operated in small pods of 2-3 people that were a mix of BD & eng. This was great for coming up with new ideas & testing them quickly, but what we needed was consistency & quality. To do this, we restructured our teams to become 2 squads (Discover & Apply) that each focused on a core product area.
• How we honored our commitments -> Each squad would a monthly product strategy set by me and clear weekly goals. Once we commit to these goals together every Monday, we will move heaven & earth to achieve them by Friday.
• How we gathered -> Instead of an all-team standup followed by function-specific standups (dev sync & BD sync), we restructured our standups around the 2 squads. And they would be 15 mins each instead of 30 mins.
• How I showed up -> At the core, this was a mindset shift in becoming genuinely commited to everyone's growth. It showed up in small ways like taking my headphones off, listening to conversations in the office, and proactively providing feedback after every interaction instead of waiting until our 1-1's.

I presented all of this at our first all-hands in 2025, and the reaction was mixed. I could tell that people were excited to try something new, but at the same time this was a really big change that put a lot of pressure squarely on me. Every project & product decision was flowing through me.

This was full-blown "Founder Mode".

Gaining momentum

The biggest week 1 goal was to make our customer document search workflows 10x better. We crushed this goal. In less than a week, we...

• Built a holistic search QA dataset & eval with real examples from production traces
• Improved internal document search precision & recall by 20%+
• Introduced web + literature integrations w/ a new source selector UX component
• Improved source citations w/ inline highlighting

Within a week, customers got to experience a brand new search that was more relevant and more powerful. On top of that, we delivered delightful new UX that made controlling sources and source attribution easier. The team was firing on all cyclinders, and everyone could feel that this was different.

But this was a bunny hill. We had been working on some of this before the new year, and I reminded everyone of this at our weekly retro. A good week is a fluke. We need more than just a good week to turn things around.

I remember getting a lot of praise at retro. Someone said it was "one of Doug's all-time best weeks." I later shared with Helena that I was nervous I wouldn't be able to recreate it next week. To that, she said "you just showed us what the new standard looks like."

A fight for my life

The next few weeks were hell. Every week we set extremely ambitious goals that would require everyone rowing in the same direction at max speed. I remember telling my coach "I feel like if we don't hit these goals, I am going to die." It genuinely felt like a fight for my life.

And we did. We kept hitting our goals, and it felt great. Slowly I was starting to see all the reflection from 2024 pay off.

Over the course of the first 3 weeks in Jan, we completely revamped our core AI editor product. I used to hate talking about what version the editor was on. Because it was embarassing to admit how many times we had tried and failed before. But I didn't care anymore - I just wanted to make it work.

In the second week, we released the new UX & backend under a feature flag so we could start getting user feedback. And I remember scheduling a lot of calls with existing customers to do this. I was extremely nervous for the first session. I had asked the team to take a bet on this direction, and now I was about to find out if it was going to pay off.

And boy did it work.

After we turned on the feature, we asked them to jump in the workspace and share their screen. And after a minute of stumbling around and discovering where the buttons had moved to, they just started flying. We watched a grant writer write an entire first draft in less than 30 mins with multiple revisions of each paragraph. By the end of it, she said:

"Wow I'm not sure what you guys did, but this is a lot better than it was before"

Coming up for air

I learned a lot of things from this experience. First, I learned that I was capable of a lot and I learned just how intense this fire can burn. Second, I learned afterwards that there was still a lot of interpersonal scar tissue that we had to work through. After all, you can change process & product by snapping your fingers, but it takes a while for people to really trust that this is the new way we're going to be doing things now after having done the old thing for so long.

But one thing I do remember is the confidence I felt coming out of this. I remember thinking it's not a matter of if, but when I will build that massive company. And I knew in that moment that I had unlocked something. Something that nobdy could ever take away from me.