"I didn't enjoy the transition," Josh says flatly. Scaling InDebted from a solo operator in 2016 to 200+ people across seven countries forced him to change as an individual — but "I know one thing is true: I love the early stage of building."
See Josh Foreman's full take
Josh's take is that when you start a company and it starts to scale, "you as an individual will need to change." He can clearly scale — he's been through the journey — but the nostalgia is for the early days: no money, tough times, and being "in the engine room" seeing something come to life.
The tension between the builder and the executive "has been, was and is" real. "I lean into problems in a big way and I get a lot of self reward and satisfaction from solving complex problems... so I don't do well as an executive working with other executives who are scared of using technology — like just staring into the abyss and chewing glass."
What made the two sides work together was the translation layer: "I'm not the engineer that pats myself on the back because I think the code is really cool. I'm the one that pats myself on the back — someone's paid us money for something that we built." Technical enough to build, commercial enough to connect what gets built to what investors and customers need.