A termination. A recovery. A new offer — pulled after I disclosed what happened. And in the gap between all of it: building a platform that covered the full lifecycle, a methodology worth teaching, and a way of showing up to an interview that changed the conversation entirely.
There were two losses before the landing. The second one happened because I told the truth. The losses weren’t setbacks on the way to the same destination — they changed what got built. That’s the journey.
Senior AI role at an enterprise content management software company. Building tools, knowing the craft, inside the machine. Good work, meaningful problems, a clear sense of direction. The kind of position that feels stable because it has been stable — until it isn’t.
Termination. Not a performance story — an economic calculation. The company made a decision; the decision landed on you. This beat is short. The temptation is to explain it. Resist. What matters is what happened next, not what caused this.
The first loss was the termination — a company making a calculation. The second loss was different. A few months later, after recovering and rebuilding, a new offer came in. I disclosed what had happened at the enterprise software company. The offer was pulled. So there were two losses, and the second one happened because I told the truth.
That is the part of this story that would make most people stop disclosing. It would be easy to learn the wrong lesson: keep it vague, protect yourself, let people assume. The audience in this room will face versions of this. Name it directly.
After the second loss — the one that happened because of honesty — there is a choice about what kind of person you become. Fully between roles, with no obvious next move. This is the part of the story nobody tells at conferences because it isn’t clean. But this is where the real work happened. No employer to build for, no roadmap to follow, no performance review to optimize toward. Just the actual problems, built the way they should be built, with nothing left to protect.
The methodology crystallizes. Not just a platform — a way of working. Research the org until you understand their specific fear. Build on their stack. Seed the artifact with their actual failure modes. Run the presentation as an eval against a voice agent shaped like the people in the room. Know you’re ready when the questions don’t slow you down. This is the elixir in progress.
The Xcel role. A contract at a regulated utility, owning post-deployment AI quality and governance. The conversation in that room was different from every earlier one — not because the role was better, but because the approach had changed. Showing up with the mockup running meant the interview was about what to build next, not whether to trust the candidate.
Standing in this room is the return. The elixir is the methodology — portable, improvable, applicable to the next person who is between roles and building anyway. The journey didn’t produce a better version of the old job. It produced a different way of working that compounds across every role from here.