Go f*** yourself.

Go fire yourself.

November 2018. I was at the Ritz in London, pacing back and forth in my hotel room, panicking. The billionaire founder of a 100M+ user app who flew me in had just asked if I’d be interested in being his CMO.

Ludicrous.

I was 25. Having started my “career” by securing a deal on Shark Tank for a cardboard box prototype at 19, I’d found myself in so many dumbfounding, outlier career situations that I knew I needed something special—a substitute frontal lobe for my notoriously peculiar professional predicaments, always on standby.

In this moment, that #1 dial was Christine Hunsicker.

(She’s the legendary founder I mentioned in my welcome email—the one who gave me my first true career break. In 2017, Christine made space for me in her company to grow, accepting a “slowdown” to train me on how to build a tech company by offering me a Product Management apprenticeship with her COO, George.)

Thank you, Christine and George.

I had just left that gig to chase this shiny London object…

Frontal lobe still not fully intact yet, remember?

Christine took my call from the London hotel room anyway.

I was talking a mile a minute until Christine brought me to a halt with:

“Kaeya. What’s the worst that can happen? You take the job and you get fired. So what?”

Oh.

That nugget became a guiding principle for me to “go fire myself” at least once a year thereafter.

Here’s how:

1. Write a fresh job description for my current role.

2. Sit down with the serious intent to fire myself from it.

3. Draft a “Kaeya, you’re fired” email to myself, listing the reasons from most severe to least.

4. Sit, and reflect deeply.

5. Focus in on the #1 reason I’m getting fired—and make sure it doesn’t happen IRL.

By 2022, with $4.2M in VC funding, real CEO responsibility on my shoulders for the very first time—a real board that existed to fire me—I was doing this exercise at least once per quarter ahead of our board meetings.

Every time, the list of reasons to fire myself grew longer.

New reasons. New variants of old reasons.

But the most severe reason was strictly tactical. And it never changed. Not once.

It was the mounting legal roadblocks impeding my ability to execute our original seed business plan—unlocking influencer marketing at scale by rewarding everyday shoppers with cash back for posting their purchases on TikTok.

(Like Ibotta but for Gen Z)

But we couldn’t clear the red tape from Fortune 500 brands or meet FTC and TikTok advertising compliance policies without the business turning into a mostly manual influencer marketing service, managing our shopper users like talent that required constant guidance and training.

(Side note, this is why influencer marketing agencies will never be replaced with technology, btw.)

No matter what we tried, the most severe issue—that red tape—was suffocating.

In September 2023, desperately gasping for air at this point, the pivot to SwayID became clear to me.

Then, on January 21, 2024, during my quarterly “go f*** yourself” exercise, for the first time since closing our seed round, the red tape morphed from the #1 reason to fire myself —> into the #1 reason for businesses to buy our product.

Bingo.

In case you’re going to try my “go f*** yourself” exercise, and find the new $43K FTC fines (in effect since October 2024) for non-compliant UGC ads and influencer posts on your list, reach out. We, at SwayID, can help.

PS: I passed on that CMO gig with the London billionaire in November 2018. I flew back to the Bay Area and decided to start this company instead. A couple weeks later, Christmas came early…I woke up on my mattress on the floor in Palo Alto to an email from the London billionaire asking me where to send the $15k check he wanted to offer me to thank me for considering the job. And those were the first dollars I leveraged to build SwayID.

PPS: The tiny details may be slightly off, but yes, this is my real life.