FaceCamp 2025: The Retreat Where the Future of Our Company Was Decided

December 5, 2025 By Brendan (Founder & CEO)

Last week I flew out to FaceCamp 2025, the small, invitation-only gathering in the California redwoods that a lot of people in tech quietly call “the real one” — no stages, no sponsors, just 40-50 founders and operators who actually run things, talking openly for three straight days.

I went in with one explicit goal: figure out what we’re going to do next year at the operating level. We’ve grown fast, cash flow is strong, the team is world-class, but we’ve also accumulated some structural complexity that’s starting to hurt velocity. Everyone feels it. I needed to pressure-test every option with people who have already lived through the consequences of each path.

The conversations were blunt.

Day 1 was mostly diagnostics. Late-night fireside with three other CEOs who have taken companies past $500M ARR: we mapped out org bloat, incentive drift, decision latency, and the quiet morale erosion that shows up when process outruns purpose.

Day 2 we went into trade-offs. Split the company? Stay integrated but reorganize around products instead of functions? Double down on decentralization and live with the duplication tax? Sell a minority stake to bring in a heavy-hitting board? The usual menu, but discussed with real numbers attached — who actually made each option work, who tried and regretted it, what the second-order effects were 12–24 months later.

By the end of Day 3 we had convergence. Not consensus — convergence. The right answer was obvious once we stripped away ego and narrative.

So here it is, effective today, December 5, 2025:

We are splitting the company into two independent operating units under a shared holding company.

1. Core Platform (the engine that 95% of readers think of when they think of us) – Will remain lean, founder-led, and obsessed with speed and quality. – Headcount will actually shrink slightly in 2026 through attrition and refocusing. – P&L fully transparent internally, same as always.

2. Growth Ventures (everything we’ve launched in the last 36 months that’s scaling fast but pulling the core team in too many directions) – Will become its own company with its own CEO (announcing that hire in January), dedicated engineering, go-to-market, and fundraising track if needed. – We’re carving out $180M of cash from the balance sheet as a Series A-equivalent for them at a valuation that reflects real traction. Current shareholders maintain pro-rata economics.

Shared services (legal, finance, HR, security) stay at the holdco level, thin and mostly automated.

This is not a “spin-out to die.” Growth Ventures is already profitable and growing faster than Core. This is about focus. Core gets to move fast and stay paranoid again. Ventures gets the oxygen and accountability it needs to become a unicorn on its own terms instead of being the “side project” inside someone else’s culture.

I’ve never made a decision this quickly after feeling stuck for this long. FaceCamp forced the conversations I had been delaying because they’re emotionally hard. Three days of unfiltered feedback from people who don’t work for me and don’t need to be polite was exactly the forcing function required.

The org chart changes roll out Monday. All-hands at 11am PT. No one is losing their job involuntarily; almost everyone has a clearer mandate than they did yesterday.

Onward. Faster, cleaner, and more focused than we’ve been in years.

Thanks to the FaceCamp crew for the clarity. See some of you again next November.

— Brendan