What twelve years from first employee to Chief Revenue Officer taught her about confidence, and what she tells anyone leaving a title behind.
In June 2026, Laurie Galazzo left the company she had joined twelve years earlier as its first employee. “The worst part wasn’t the last day,” she says. “It was the Monday morning just after. For twelve years I’d known exactly who I was the second I opened my eyes: I was the person building this thing. Then that sentence was just gone, and nothing had replaced it yet.”
She calls it “the vertigo nobody warns you about when you leave something you built.” The question that morning wasn’t what she would do. It was, in her words, “who am I when the thing I was is over.”
By then she had got the thing she’d been chasing. She joined AppTweak, a SaaS company in mobile marketing headquartered in Brussels, in 2014, “when we were 3 people in a tiny room,” as she wrote in her farewell post. When she left it had “130+ people, 10+ offices worldwide,” and she was its Chief Revenue Officer. Twelve years from first employee to CRO was, she says, “the arc I’d been chasing the whole time.” What followed was “realizing that arriving didn’t fill the space I thought it would.”
“That’s not a sad story; it’s the interesting one. The question stopped being ‘how do I get more’ and became ‘what’s the life I’m actually building around all this wanting.”
Laurie Galazzo, Founder, The Ambition Memo
That question is what she writes about now. Laurie is the founder of The Ambition Memo, a weekly note on “ambition beyond achievement,” with a new issue every Friday, about “the careers we build, and the lives we build around them.” Alongside it she invests in and advises early-stage founders, and helps companies, as she puts it, “actually put AI to work.”
One Number at a Time
Laurie names two mistakes, and the first is about measurement. “They measure ambition by one number at a time,” she says: the next title, the next promotion, the next round. “It works, right up until they get the thing and feel the space it was supposed to fill still sitting there empty.”
People who already hold the title report something close to it. When Deloitte surveyed 1,050 C-suite executives in 2023, 75% said they were seriously considering quitting for a job that would better support their well-being.
“The second mistake is believing they have to choose: ambition or a full life, drive or peace,” she says. “That binary is everywhere, and it’s false.” You don’t have to trade one for the other, in her view, and quietly believing you do “is what costs people years.” She sees it most in “high performers mid-climb: the ones doing everything right and wondering why it doesn’t feel the way they were told it would.”
Those are the people the Memo is written for.
A Weekly Note, Written From Inside
“The person I’m writing for is ambitious and thoughtful, and usually feels more than they let on,” Laurie says. They look capable, often “genuinely accomplished,” and are “privately still building themselves.” Many are, as she describes them, “in or near a transition: a role ending, a reinvention, a ‘what now.’”
What they get each Friday is one note, written from experience: some weeks a story, some weeks an idea. She is specific about what it leaves out. “No productivity hacks. No five-step formulas. No pretending I’ve figured it all out,” she wrote when she announced it. She built all of it herself: “The website. The newsletter. The words. The design. Just me, my laptop, and a slightly unreasonable amount of time thinking out loud with Claude.”
The one thing she does that most people in her world don’t, she says, is in where she stands when she writes.
“I write from inside it, not from the far side of it. I’m not posing at the summit telling you how I got there. I’m a few steps ahead on the same climb, telling you the truth about it while I’m still on it.”
Laurie, Founder, The Ambition Memo
She has been open about how that feels. “I’m more nervous publishing this than I was about most things I did as a CRO,” she wrote. “Because this time, there’s nowhere to hide behind a company, a team, or a title.” The twelve years behind the Memo started with a contract she hadn’t applied for.
A Four-Month Contract
Laurie was, in her words, “fresh out of school, hired onto a four-month contract I hadn’t even applied for: no track record, no proof, nothing but whatever he saw in me.” He was Olivier Verdin, AppTweak’s CEO and co-founder, the person who first hired her. “What mattered wasn’t a speech,” she says. “It was that he kept handing me things that were slightly too big for me and never once acted like that was a risk.”
She has a line for what that did. “You believe in yourself in retrospect; in the moment, you borrow it from someone,” she says, and he lent it to her before she could.
In those first years she did “whatever the company needed at that stage,” she says: marketing, content, sales, “whatever was on fire.” “It felt scattered. It was actually the most valuable thing I ever did, because range compounds: the person who understands how the whole engine fits together ends up running it.” Her profile lists the titles in order: Content Strategist, Inbound Marketing Manager, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer. Over that time she built the company’s global commercial organization: sales, marketing, customer success and consulting.
Then Verdin asked her to move to San Francisco.
San Francisco, and a Different Game
“I said yes on the spot,” she wrote. She moved in 2019 to open the US office, which began as “a tiny 2-person WeWork.” The assumption back home, she says, “was that America would work the way Europe had: same playbook, bigger market, just run it harder.” “What I found was a different game. Longer enterprise cycles, buyers who needed real qualification and a reason to move, relationships that had to be built before anything closed.”
“So we stopped selling the European way,” she says. “We got disciplined about which accounts were actually winnable, built the enterprise motion around them, and grew the US from a two-person office into a real revenue base and team of 15.” Some of the biggest names in tech, she adds, were in the room.
“I left Brussels with a few bags and a dream and came home six years later with double the luggage, a wife, and a dog,” she wrote. In her last years as Chief Revenue Officer she had hired four VPs who, together, oversaw the entire organization. For someone who started as employee number one, as she puts it on her profile, “that felt like an amazing accomplishment.”
Then, in June 2026, she left.
Moving Before She Felt Ready
Her last day was June 12. She called leaving “one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. My first job, my first team, a third of my life. But after 12 years, I knew it was time to write my own next chapter.”
What she did about the Monday morning was, she says, “small and deliberate: I started building the next thing before I felt ready to, because I already knew the feeling of readiness wasn’t coming to get me. I’d have to move first and let it catch up.” She completed an AI program at Kellogg Executive Education, and spent what she called her “Exploration Phase” narrowing many directions down to a few. One of them became the Memo.
It’s also the first thing she tells anyone who is leaving a title behind and starting again on their own name.
“The confidence you think you’re losing was never in the title. You built it, and you’re taking it with you.”
Laurie, Founder, The Ambition Memo
The name on the door “did some of the talking for you,” she says, and now you find out how much of it was always you. The habit she names as most her own is a plain one.
Showing Up on the Flat Days
Asked for the habit a colleague would recognize, Laurie gives two words: “Showing up.” She means fully, for her team, “even when I have nothing left in the tank.” “I do not run hot and cold,” she says. “Anyone can bring it when they are feeling great; showing up the same way when you are not is the whole job. That consistency is a decision, not a mood I wait for.”
Her advice to someone in a first commercial role comes from the same place. The confidence you envy in the people above you, she says, “is mostly built, not born.” They constructed it “the same way you will, by doing the thing badly, then less badly, then well.”
On selling, she changed her mind. “Early on I thought selling was about how well you knew your product,” she says. It is about how well you understand the person you are selling to. “People can always tell the difference between someone running a script and someone who genuinely cares whether the thing is right for them.”
Where Laurie Is Now
In her own line: “Building The Ambition Memo, investing in and advising early-stage founders (Business Angel), and helping companies actually put AI to work.” A new Memo goes out every Friday at theambitionmemo.com.
She wants it to reach three groups: ambitious operators in transition, whom she describes as “people leaving senior roles to build their own thing,” early-stage founders and the angel and investor world around them, and “high-achieving women building careers and lives on their own terms.” She is clear about what she hopes they conclude. “I don’t want them thinking ‘good advice,’” she says. “I want them thinking: ‘she’s honest about the part most people hide, and I trust the way she thinks.’”
Outside work there is Formula 1. “I follow it properly, and I made it to the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa this year,” she says. Her wife, who is American, moved to Belgium with her from San Francisco last year. Mornings go to class workouts. “Keeping the discipline has honestly been a game changer for me, both mentally and physically,” she wrote.
The day before the first issue of the Memo was due, she told her network she was publishing it anyway. “I can still see the seams on everything I’ve made,” she wrote. “Turns out that’s not the flaw. It might be the best part.”
Five Lines from Laurie’s Diary
“Some people just have it” is the most expensive lie in business.
The goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the room: it’s to build the room.
Strategy without proximity is just guessing.
Titles aren’t permanent. You earn your seat every day.
Listen more than you pitch.
From the Diary of Laurie Galazzo
Laurie Galazzo is a Brussels-based business angel and the Founder of The Ambition Memo.
| Role | Founder, The Ambition Memo. Business Angel in tech startups. |
| Based in | Brussels, Belgium |
| Previously | Chief Revenue Officer and first employee, AppTweak (2014 to 2026) |
| Also | Helping companies put AI to work |
“Ambition beyond achievement.”
Editor’s Note
Laurie Galazzo spent twelve years at one company, from first employee to Chief Revenue Officer, and left in June 2026. We chose her because she is writing about that change while she is still inside it, and says so. Her answers put the feeling and the record side by side: the Monday morning after, and the two-person office that became a team of 15. What convinced the editors is that she does not claim to have finished.
Executives Diary, Editorial
