We sold a healthy company because we forgot to make it fun

Nine years. 2% churn. 75% growth. Profitable.

We still ran out of gas.

Someone asked me recently what advice I'd give myself if I were starting Perch again. I had a lot of answers. But the one I emphasized was this: invest more in culture.

When we sold Perch to Catapult in 2025, the business was genuinely healthy. We had built something real. But we had been sprinting for nine years.

We were perfectionists. We put the customer first in every decision. We worked incredibly hard and took enormous pride in the product we were building. But we never intentionally built a culture that was enjoyable to live in every day.

Grit and hard work is the sprinting. Investing in culture is pacing yourself so you and your team have the juice to go the distance.

Fun was always deferred. After the next milestone. After the next fundraise. After we hit the number.

The milestones never stopped.

I want to be clear about something. We weren't looking to sell, and we didn't sell because the business was struggling. We sold because a great offer came, and the honest alternative was committing another decade at that pace. A decade of more pain. After nine years of sprinting, that wasn't an attractive option for us. We believed handing Perch to Catapult was the right move for our customers, our employees, and the product we'd spent a decade building.

But I also know that if the journey had been more enjoyable, that calculus might have been different.

Burnout is invisible until it isn't. It doesn't show up on a dashboard. Culture is never a line item. So it never felt urgent. There was always something more pressing, more measurable, more obviously connected to survival.

That was a mistake.

We did invest in culture, but it was forced. It showed up at the annual offsite, at the occasional team lunch, at the end-of-year party. Not daily. The investment in fun, in team traditions, in real celebrations, in genuine human connection never pays immediate dividends. You can't measure it cleanly. But it is what determines whether you and your team can go the distance.

If I were writing a letter to the version of myself sitting in that dorm room at MIT, about to start this thing, I'd say: build a company you actually want to show up to. Not just one worth showing up for.

The sacrifice is only sustainable if the work is worth living, not just worth winning.