Last week I spoke with a founder who, right in the middle of his company's growth, decided to become a commercial airline pilot.

The company had hit break even, and growth was steady. So he brought in a CEO to take some of the weight off his plate, and started flying in 2019, without ever fully stepping away from the company.

One year later COVID hit. Travel stopped completely. The company needed him back full force, so he went all in on Waynabox again. He never actually left.

Dot Fer interviews Pau Sendra, founder of Waynabox, for ProductFitCoach.

He is Pau Sendra, and the company is Waynabox, a travel-tech company that pioneered surprise trips in Europe: you book a weekend, and only find out where you're flying two days before departure.

Over the years Waynabox has taken more than 300,000 travelers on surprise trips across the continent, and in 2023 it was acquired by one of Spain's largest media groups, Atresmedia, which owns some of the country's biggest TV channels, and had already been a small shareholder for years.

Here's what stuck with me from that conversation:

Growing too fast can kill you just as easily as growing too slow

He said the real danger was never one big crisis. It was the constant math between growth and investment. Grow without investing in the team, you die. Invest without the growth to justify it, you die too.

Zero revenue for months, right in the middle of COVID. The company survived anyway

Bookings stopped completely and cash kept draining, but the company had to keep paying a full team just to handle refunds and reservations.

What kept them alive wasn't one genius move. It was a pile of small things stacking together: coming back to a startup accelerator they'd worked with before, and enough investor trust built over the years to back them up as a company still worth investing in, even while making literally zero revenue. He called this a "puzzle" they had to build.

The hardest moments weren't COVID, even though the company was on the edge of closing

Oddly enough, COVID wasn't his hardest time at Waynabox, even though the company was in real danger of shutting down. It wasn't his fault, everyone on the team was fighting the same storm together, so the weight wasn't only his to carry. What actually hit harder were the other times the company came close to failing because of decisions he made himself. A completely different kind of pressure, when it's all on you.

When one pivot got banned, they pivoted again. Then again

During COVID, flights got banned, so they switched to selling road trips instead. Road trips got banned six months later. So they tried surprise dinners. They were trying to stay alive one restriction at a time.

Letting people go is still the hardest part of the job, no matter the reason

He said firing someone is the toughest thing a founder has to do, period. But the one time he had to lay off a small group because of his own mistake, it went better than he expected. The team understood, the relationship they'd built with each other wasn't something that happened overnight. It was years of trust that made a hard conversation feel human, instead of transactional.

The line that stuck with me the most:

The pressure that almost broke him was never external. It was always the pressure he put on himself when something was wrong because of his own fault.

Watch the interview teaser:

Full interview was launched on August 6th, 2026

See the full interview here.

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