This week, stories from inside our workplaces moved through the headlines. I do not know which details are true or noise, and this column will not judge a case it cannot verify. But they circle a question every founder eventually meets in the mirror: can the same drive that builds a company also burn the people inside it?
Let me begin with the confession. I have been called a slave driver. I have also been called the best mentor a person could have had, by people who went on to build their own companies after working beside me. I have been accused of being coldly rational and, in the same breath, of refusing to give up. In some rooms I am the reason a career took off; in others I am remembered as difficult.
