Being promoted has more impact on the individuals economic success than the product growth. The decision which product to work on stems from the odds of getting promoted and thus we began onboarding people with the wrong state of mind - seeing Waze as a stepping stone and not as a calling.

The famous Netflix culture doc claims that culture is “who you hire, fire or let go”. I strongly agree with this, reality > theory.

There are people who are great for a stage of the company and later, do not have the right skills as the company grows. It is not their fault, it is reality. But not being able to replace them with people that do have the right skills means that people are constantly trying to “offload” an employee on a different team rather than fire them

All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership.  Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent.

being part of a Corporation means that the signal to noise ratio changes dramatically.

An ever increasing percent of our time went to non user value creation tasks and that changes the DNA of the company quickly, from customer focused to corporate guidelines focused.

The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted, since that drives your equity and salary payments.  This breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward. Corp-Tech gives you no risk returns on equity.

These realities lead to extreme focus on promotion vs product success -- Me > We > Product/Users.

Tech workers leaving college directly to Corp-Tech and never working for a “real company” end up spending their time complaining about the wrong things.

at the end of every day, I always ask myself "what did I do for our users today". This simple exercise helps keep priorities straight. When I found myself avoiding this question because I was embarrassed by the answer, I knew my time was up.

there is a challenge of how to compensate when there is no equity upside but I think the main point is to keep the company focused on the product, with the right employees there for the right reasons and empowering the leader to control her destiny.

I am confident that the Waze acquisition was a success. The problem was me - believing I can keep the start-up magic within a corporation, in spite of all the evidence showing opposite.

I would recommend to the 2013 me to not try and innovate within but rather focus on exiting the company as fast as possible and building the right team/structure/succession plan to make it happen instead of fighting the nature of the beast.

When you decide to sell a company, you need to be honest with yourself that this is the end of your era, and not pretend that you will be able to continue to build the company but with a different shareholders.

If I had to summarize it, I would say that the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down.

You need to be able to answer the "what have I done for our users today" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.