Over the next six months, I did something I am not proud of and also something I would do again in a heartbeat. I told each of my six engineers, individually, on different days, in different locations, that I was helping them make a change. I took them to dinner. I took them to coffee. I took Priya to the Whole Foods parking lot at 7 PM on a Tuesday and sat in her car and told her, in complete confidence, that I had an opportunity. Every single one of them said yes.

Not one of them hesitated. One of them — a senior engineer named Marcus — actually started crying in the dinner where I told him, because he said he had been trying to work up the nerve to quit for three months and had not been able to find a landing spot. Aria's company interviewed all six of them over a period of twelve weeks, under heavy NDA, at a satellite office three miles from our building. Every single engineer was offered. Every single engineer accepted. And on the last weekend of February, we coordinated our resignation letters, signed our new offer letters, and picked our start date: Monday, March 4th.