Chad Loder's security and technology blogStartups, information security, software development, leadership, and technologyWednesday, April 30, 2014Culture eats strategy for breakfast - a short goodbye :)Today is my last day as an official employee at Rapid7, the company I co-founded 14 years ago. While I'll still be involved as a part-time advisor, it's always bittersweet when starting a new chapter. I thought I would share my farewell letter to the company - it's as good a summary as I can make of my philosophy on startups and on the importance of corporate culture.Fellow Moose,Fourteen years ago, almost to the day, Tas, Alan and I started Rapid7. It's been an amazing ride - we have accomplished so much in that time and I'm proud to have played a part in this incredible story. I've had the opportunity to work with some pretty amazing people from whom I've learned a great deal. I've learned about what it takes to grow and scale a business, what it takes to succeed, and I've learned a lot about myself. One of the things I've learned is that I am, at my core, a startup guy. I love small companies and small teams, I love starting new things, and it's time for me to get back to my roots. So…tomorrow will be my last day as an official employee of Rapid7.Someone asked me the other day what it's like to be part of a startup. The best way I can describe it is that it's like a shared delusion; you have to keep the hallucination going, keep everyone dreaming, keep YOURSELF dreaming, until that dream starts to become a reality. Once in a while, someone "wakes up", they fall out of the dream, and we don’t hear from them again. And that's OK - we just keep going.You know in the cartoon where Wile-E-Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and keeps running on thin air? It's like that - except you've got a dozen people running beside you. And everyone is responsible for making sure that nobody else looks down.You start off with just a couple people - not geniuses, just regular folks who have no right to start a company. If you're incredibly lucky, you've got a killer idea, but probably what you've actually got is an idea that's just barely good enough to work. And if you can somehow find the nerve to believe you'll succeed when the odds are overwhelmingly tilted towards failure; if you can stay flexible and keep adapting and making sh*t up until you find out what works; if you can work 10x harder than everyone else so you can outrun your early failures; if you can sustain that belief, that dream state, for long enough…then you have a chance of pulling it off.That's why the "Who" is so much more important than the "What". That's why culture matters. And that's why I've always said that we're not in the software business. We're not even in the security business. We're in the people business.When I look b