7 famous founders talk about leaving their own companies

Noah Glass is one of Twitter’s cofounders no one knows about. He was pushed out of the company back in 2006, but is still credited for coming up with the name Twitter.

In a 2011 interview with Business Insider, Glass shared what it feels like to be erased from Twitter history:

“I was not in the story, which in some ways was difficult to deal with in the beginning, since it was a massive labor of love and a massive labor to get it created."

But Glass seems fine with not getting enough credit, because at the end of the day, it's all about the product:

Twitter is a phenomenon and a massively beneficial tool and it's incredibly useful and it helps a lot of people. I realized the story's not about me. That's okay.

Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus recently reclaimed his CEO position at the online gaming company he created in 2007. It was a big moment for PIncus because he had stepped down from all operational roles at Zynga in 2014, after resigning from the CEO position a year earlier.

But up until last year, Pincus didn’t really give himself a good grade as CEO, as he admitted during an interview with Kara Swisher:

“I think I give myself high marks being an entrepreneur and entrepreneuring a big idea about how popular social gaming could be…But I learned a lot of hard lessons on the CEO front … and do not give myself very high marks as a CEO of a large-scale company.”

He also told Swisher, “I basically fired myself,” because the job at Zynga wasn’t something he was passionate about at the time.

“Managing more than 200 people, maybe 150 people, isn’t fun to me and is not my skill set,” he said.

Sandy Lerner was one of the cofounders of Cisco, the networking equipment company now worth over $140 billion.

But she’s no longer part of it after losing control of the company to a management group led by one of its earliest investors, Sequoia Capital’s Don Valentine. She was fired from the company shortly after Cisco went public in 1990.

In a post on Inc Magazine, Lerner reveals the whole experience was “devastating,” especially the way investors treated her and her cofounder Leonard Bosack, who also happens to be her ex-husband. She wrote:

"When I was fired, it was devastating. I spent years crawling out from that. I did not understand an investor could be an adversary…I always thought that if someone invested in your business, that meant he or she believed in it. I assumed our investor supported us, because his money was tied up in our success. I did not realize he had decoupled the success of the company from that of the founders."

Groupon cofounder Andrew Mason has always kept a good sense of humor, and his happy-go-lucky nature is well-reflected in his comments about his firing too.

His resignation letter in 2013, still considered one of the most charming goodbye memos of all time, is a good example. He wrote:

"After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today."

On a more serious note, he continued:

"If you're wondering why... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that's hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable."

Getting fired is a tough thing to recover from for any type of employee. But Mason seems to have found a way to deal with it, as he tweeted just two months after his resignation:

"I love the way press headlines simply refer to me as ‘Fired CEO.’ Oh well, a step up from the prior descriptor, 'Music Major.'"

Saverin is one of the cofounders of Facebook, who held the CFO position in its very early days. After a series of disagreements over how to fund the company, Saverin was eventually pushed out of the company by Mark Zuckerberg.

After almost a decade of founding Facebook, Saverin finally opened up about his relationship with Zuckerberg in a 2012 interview with Brazilian magazine Veja.

"I have only good things to say about Mark, there are no hard feelings between us,

... He always knew that the only way for Facebook to grow was to maintain its central idea, that of people truly presenting themselves as they are, without nicknames or pseudonyms. That’s Facebook’s biggest strength, what allowed us to transform it into an instrument of protest, like what happened in Egypt, but also in an instrument of business, not to mention a way of naturally connecting with friends."

Before Elon Musk became Tesla’s CEO, there was Martin Eberhard who cofounded the company with Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk, who was the largest investor, eventually took over the company, but Eberhard apparently wasn’t too happy with the way things turned out.

Eberhard wrote in a blog post in 2007.

"I am not at all happy with the way I was treated. And I do not think this was the very best way to handle a transition - not the best for Tesla Motors, not the best for Tesla's customers (to whom I still feel a strong sense of responsibility), and not for Tesla's investors."

He went on to talk about companies that kept its founders in non-CEO roles, like Google, implying Tesla should have done the same thing too. (At that time, Eric Schmidt was still CEO of Google.)

"Larry and Sergey over at Google are prime examples: they still drive the vision and technology of the company, and still define the public image of Google. But management of Google is now in the hands of seasoned professionals who know how to run and grow the company far beyond Larry and Sergey could have."

Check out 11 tech founders who struggled to settle in to life in the US when they first arrived!