One day I was struggling in a high profile job that was beating me into the floor, the next I'm a teacher, setting up an AI school for local SMEs.
Part 1 - Death of a Job
I left my last CMO position after only six months in the role. That's the headline, but underneath there's quite a lot more to it.
The L1 Blockchain I worked for was backed by a notable venture builder, and when I joined, I had high expectations and even higher hopes. Working at a blockchain backed by a triple Unicorn sounded like a dream ticket, but despite wanting to do it, I didn't pause to ask myself whether I could do it.
This was partly down to hubris, but also because for the first five rounds of the interview process I'd been going after another, totally different job - a Marketing VP position in a B2C metaverse gaming venture, a role significantly closer to my wheelhouse.
An organisational pivot their end closed the metaverse gaming door whilst opening a new, bigger door - a CMO position in Web3. I didn't have any experience whatsoever in Web3, nor did I have expertise in marketing crypto, a DeFi protocol, nor the channels used to grow one.
I knew early on, like day one, it would be a challenge.
Add to that another protocol launch, a repositioning, a brand refresh and subsequently three other GTMs and I went from excitable newbie to drowning swimmer in less than a month.
It was a great organisation and has a fabulous team, but the pressure of learning as I was building got too much, too quickly. The crux was that I couldn't hack it, and for someone who prides themselves on being resilient, I became increasingly worried about how I could possibly graft, learn and think my way out of trouble.
"You can't quit" was the record playing around my head on repeat every morning at 4am when I'd inevitably wake up, working as hard as I could to stay afloat whilst slowly but steadily sinking.
I know plenty of quality marketers who are struggling to find a job right now. It's grim out there, as I saw first hand only last year, and not a time to be voluntarily exiting a salaried position, so I tried to push on and make it work by any means possible.
It turns out, I couldn't.
I came back from a week-long conference in Vegas, started a new week facing a number of uphill challenges and immediately hit a wall. My wife C had seen me overcome challenges in the past, but she'd never seen me like this. She took one look at me - frantic, anxious and lost - and called it. I was done.
The relief of realising that I could stop pretending I was - or would ever be - the right person for the job was immediate.
Being open about failure is tricky, especially in the professional realm. Confidence and your track record are two of the most tangible and essential traits you carry with you. They're like your LinkedIn badges of honour. I was leaving with neither, and ego is a cruel mistress, but I recognised that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something to change really was a fast track to madness, or at the very least some form of breakdown.
So why the openness? The accepted wisdom for personal brand protection would be to bury this failure deep in my psychological substrata, pretend it never happened and move on in a more suitable role. However, I'm a firm advocate in owning your own story, both good and bad, and I like to think about problems in a brutally honest way, starting with myself.
I took an opportunity, gave it my best shot, it didn't work out, so I'm moving on. The world didn't end, and whilst my ego and confidence might need a few repairs, I'm happier not pretending I can morph into something I'm most certainly not.
I've been through some interesting and challenging phases in my career over the last quarter of a century, convinced that when things got tough I had the mental fortitude and creative stamina to hack it. In this instance, I couldn't - and I guess this is the point I want to get across:
If you've been out of work for a while, both your head and your circumstances will tell you that ANY job is the right job.
I'm here to say that if you find yourself in that situation, you should double down on your due diligence, self-assessment and pragmatic decision making before saying yes.
I didn't think there was anything worse than the constant frustration and financial implications of being unemployed. Turns out, I was wrong.
Part 2 - Birth of a Purpose
OK, so with my exit rationale out of the way, on to more positive things. I wanted to start something new where I could be my own boss again, launch and scale a business and have fun doing it for the next few years.
I usually have at least ten crap business ideas floating around my desktop and context folders at any given time, most of which come to me on a dog walk in the morning and have been discounted as unfeasibly shit by early afternoon. However one idea just refused to die.
I was on a train down to London a few weeks ago shortly after resigning. With my marketing hat on, I sketched out an extremely honest skills audit followed by a rough cut Ikigai Matrix. Plotting my skills and interests into four categories spat out some chewy bubblegum for my brain:
I realised the AI race has progressed so quickly it's left a huge chasm in its wake: a proportion of UK professionals stuck pensively at the start gate. By the time they were being told to Claude Code their own AI agents and apps via TikTok and LinkedIn ads, they felt like admitting how little they knew would be perceived as weakness.
With heads in the sand and the ChatGPT app being used like a Google search because "...yes, I totally use AI every day", there seems to be a massive opportunity for simple, pragmatic and fun AI training to take UK professionals from zero to one with Claude, GPT, Perplexity and Gemini before honing their theoretical and practical skills and tools awareness down the line.
The business plan wrote itself - and thus was born The Oxford AI School.
Harry Lang is a director and trainer at The Oxford AI School, helping individuals and SME teams build useful AI confidence from the ground up.
I've been using AI at a base level for the last couple of years, but only in my recent role did necessity and time pressure across multiple projects require me to upskill rapidly. Encouraged by the CEO, I brought in my friend Oren Greenberg to run a custom eight week advanced AI training course with its foundations in Claude Code. The team, myself included, were able to massively increase our work output and, with the right methodologies in place, mitigate any quality seepage.
With the benefit of the theoretical training and armed with my new AI power skills, I set to work on a train journey back from London to the Shires. By the time I passed through Oxford, I had a live website and 24 hours later, I'd drafted a one pager vision, GTM, product roadmap and brand guidelines plus an expanded website through Claude and Netlify, research white paper via Perplexity, sales funnel ICP plan, social and content workflows through GPT and a few brand assets and logo concepts using Nano Banana.
In fact, it took me longer to decide on the brand name and source the domain than any of the above tasks.
I don't need nor want to build an ego massaging tech behemoth. I'm focusing on individual professionals and SME teams, initially around Oxfordshire and local environs. Early research tells me there are more than enough potential clients within easy reach and if that goes to plan, there are all sorts of angles available, from regionalisation to productisation.
As an example, I shared an Uber to the cricket with a random construction industry CEO the other week. By the end of the ten minute "so what do you do?" chat, he'd asked for my details, pending an upskilling course for his whole leadership team. Pitches don't get much easier than that.
In the near term, I plan to build the courses, grow awareness, acquire new students and teach - and that works just fine for me. I like starting things from scratch. I like getting my hands dirty. I like mother of invention growth challenges.
And I like to be responsible for my own destiny.
I've come to realise that half of the game with AI is understanding how powerful it actually is, while the other half is knowing how to effectively unlock that power whilst mitigating crud. I'm excited to demystify this burgeoning and ever-changing technology and unlock that power for everyone.
Roll forward a few weeks and here we are - T-minus one week until launch day. I make no apologies for my unashamed self-promotion in our newsletter and would be hugely grateful if you could share TheOxfordAISchool.com site and go nuts on the socials to help get it off the ground. The programme modules start at zero to one by design, and my ICPs at launch are very purposefully in Oxfordshire, London and the surrounding areas. I've built basic custom courses for specific sector ICPs including SMEs, law firms, accountants, IFAs, estate agents, farmers, and pubs and restaurants.
If you feel burned out in your job but stuck by the inevitabilities of economics, circumstance and fear, then please do get in touch. And if you've buried your head in the sand and want to get started on your own AI learning journey in a practical, fun and easy way, you know where to find me.
Harry is a director and trainer at The Oxford AI School. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and follow the school on X, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube.