Particle was me and I was it: On leaving the company I founded

Zach Supalla

Oct 29, 2026

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Earlier this year, after selling the business to Digi, I left Particle, the company I founded more than a decade ago. I left in May; now it’s October. Somehow I never quite got around to announcing that I’d left.

I didn’t intend to keep it a secret; announcing it just felt daunting. There’s so much I want to say about starting, building, running, and selling Particle. I felt compelled to put it all into one post, as if only then could anyone understand my complicated feelings about moving on.

Obviously that’s not going to work. I’ll save most of my thoughts for future posts, in the hope that they help other founders, and focus this one on the thing that’s been on my mind for the last few months: moving on.

By the time Particle was acquired, I was ready to land the plane. I’m grateful for the experience and proud of what we accomplished. But I learned the lessons of entrepreneurship the only way you can: by living through them. Particle was an incredibly challenging business to run (it turns out that, yes, hardware is hard), and I look back on those fourteen years as training at altitude. I’m better and stronger for it, but toward the end I was pretty burned out.

Selling the company you founded is indescribably grueling. The best comparison I can make is taking care of a newborn: everyone tells you it will be the most difficult thing you’ve ever done, but you can’t really comprehend it until you’ve lived through weeks of sleep deprivation, alternating between stress, anxiety, excitement, and monotony.

Imagine cramming 12 months’ worth of work into 12 weeks, during which you:

develop a post-transaction strategic plan with another leadership team you’re getting to know on the fly;

methodically list every bad thing that has ever happened to the company or might happen in the future, hoping none of it kills the deal; and

answer literally thousands of requests like “please find and upload the third amendment to the second contract with Customer X signed on June 27, 2017”.

At some point, after producing, reviewing, and redlining the largest pile of paperwork you’ve ever seen dozens of times over, you sign the last document and the deal is done. The anxiety lifts, the exhaustion hits, and you can finally take a breath.

And then you discover that you’ve signed away your identity but you haven’t yet had a chance to form a new one.

I’ve spent nearly my entire adult life being “founder and CEO of Particle”. I started the business when I was 27; now I’m 41. Particle was me and I was it. And yet that’s not exactly true: Particle was also a few hundred other people along the way. Now our paths have diverged, and we’ll both continue on to have other adventures. That feels weird. It’s a good kind of weird; I’m proud to have built something that will last, and I’m excited to start over as a wise and grizzled “second-time founder”. But first I have to figure out who I am without Particle.

I’ve spent the last few months taking time off and being purposefully aimless. I read some books, fiddled with some hobbies, and spent time with my kids. I generated a metric ton of business ideas but forced myself not to pursue any of them (yet). I’ve figured out which parts of my experience at Particle I want to carry into a new adventure and which I want to leave behind — a topic for a future post. Time away has helped me separate myself from Particle and let a new identity begin to form.

A few weeks ago I decided that the time for aimlessness was over. So now I’m a founder again. I haven’t built anything yet (vibe-coding experiments aside), but I’ve settled on an idea, and I’m starting to feel the same pull toward it that I felt toward Particle for so long. And that, it turns out, is who I am: I am someone who can get so enraptured with an idea that I can’t help but devote a meaningful slice of my life to turning it into reality.

Much like my departure from Particle, my new company isn’t a secret; it just isn’t anything yet. I’ll share more when there’s something to share. In the meantime, if you’re curious, shoot me a note; it may not exist yet, but I do love to talk about it.

To everyone who’s been part of the Particle journey — investors, advisors, partners, customers, and our developer community — thank you. I’m grateful for the trust you placed in me, whether you invested time and capital in the business, backed a Kickstarter campaign, or deployed a product on our platform. Particle is in good hands at Digi; I expect the business to grow and thrive for decades to come.

I wish all the best to the broader Particle team: our alumni, the team that landed at Digi, and the business unit we joined when we arrived. Many of the amazing people who walked the halls of Particle have gone on to do extraordinary things, and I expect there is much more to come. To all of the Particlers, past, present, and future: keep breathing cyan.