We Chose to Get Smaller: A Conversation with Anna Zarudzka

Anna Zarudzka has one of those career stories that does not fit the tech playbook. She studied jazz, painting, and film, worked in television production at Poland's biggest channels, studied law, and somehow ended up co-CEO of Boldare, a fully digital product company that has built over 300 products. Boldare runs on holacracy, with no traditional hierarchy and distributed authority, and Anna also co-founded a democratic elementary school. She did not arrive here by strategy. She arrived by curiosity, and two failed companies before this one.

What makes Anna worth listening to is how thoroughly she rejects the usual founder mythology, the top of the mountain, the growth-at-all-costs story, the idea that the CEO is irreplaceable. This conversation is about running a company without bosses, why she deliberately made hers smaller, and why she would rather build for clients than chase the SaaS dream.

There is no top

When I reached for the familiar "lonely at the top" framing, Anna pushed back on the whole concept. The top, for her, does not exist and she does not want it to. She loves the road and the path, not a summit that is really just an end. She is emphatic that this is not the same as having no goals, because without goals she would be lost or unhappy. It is goal after goal after goal. But a goal is not a peak you arrive at and stop. That distinction runs through everything she builds.

On fear, she is refreshingly honest that it grows rather than shrinks as you climb. From higher up you see more, you carry all your experience, and you know exactly how it feels to slip or lose someone on the way, so the responsibility and the height make the fear bigger, not smaller. Having spent years around genuinely glamorous people in television, she also noticed that the ones with real class rarely felt they were on top of anything. They saw themselves as part of something, a beautiful project or piece of work, while the newer, follower-chasing generation was more likely to act like they had arrived. It is roughly a 50-50 split, she says, in any industry, founders included.

The winding path was the training

For years Anna heard that she was not consistent, that she was all over the place, that she should pick one serious hobby. She now believes that being all over the place is exactly what prepared her to run a company. Music school, painting, film, law, television, each one required a big reset: a new city, new people, new rules, being a beginner again and again. It is uncomfortable, you have to let go of status, and you have to accept that the next thing might not work either.

That, she argues, is the pattern of running a company. Jumping into something new, surviving the chaos many times, being genuinely ready for change, and building from scratch with no guarantee of success. She left television specifically because she could feel she was in a dying world: digital was arriving, quality and budgets were dropping, and anyone could point a camera and be on screen. Coming from a craft where film editing meant physically taping the tape together, watching craft get replaced by "good enough" was the signal to leave. In tech, everything was new, nobody knew the rules yet, and that was thrilling.

Co-CEO is coexistence, not shared power

Anna and her co-CEO, Piotr, share the role, which is rare and which most companies cannot make work. She reframes it entirely. It was never about sharing power, which is how founders tend to think about it. Boldare came from merging two companies, a design agency and a software company, that had worked side by side for a decade, and they did not want to lose either heritage, so they combined and co-led. The creative tension is constant and important, but they have never fought about values, only decisions.

The deeper reason she values it is coexistence through good and bad times. If you run a company for as long as they have, you will hit a bad moment or need time for yourself, and having a partner means you are genuinely replaceable, which she considers a feature. People who think about building a company with others think about power, she says. She thinks about being able to step back. On being irreplaceable, she is blunt: if Steve Jobs could be pushed out of Apple, everyone is replaceable, though she adds a caveat that a pure-vision, product-led founder may be harder to replace than a co-CEO of a service company.

Scaling down on purpose

Anna is careful to correct the growth narrative. Boldare implemented holacracy at 100 people, grew to 200, and then scaled back down to 100. Three years ago that 200 would have looked impressive, and today at 100 it technically is not a growth story. Part of the shrink was forced by the market, she does not pretend otherwise, but part was very intentional. Growing fast, combined with a bad implementation of holacracy, made their leadership terrible and cost them operational excellence and service quality. So they treated the down moment as an opportunity to clean the system.

She chose a smaller, tighter team with higher standards over the 200 that "looked really good on LinkedIn but wasn't nice." Holacracy itself survived, just in a less rigid, less radical form. And she is unflinching about layoffs: roughly half were market-driven, half were "this isn't the place for you," and if she ever had a day where letting someone go felt like nothing, she says she should stop doing it. Her coping mechanism is borrowed from doctor friends: at some point you have to look at the data on the page and not the person, or you will go crazy, and she never does it alone.

Services over the SaaS dream

Most Polish tech founders dream of building the SaaS unicorn, and Anna has deliberately stuck with client services for 17 years. Her answer to "why leave money on the table" is that she genuinely loves clients and their messy, real problems, and would die of boredom in a pure product company with one problem for a year. On paper SaaS is sexier, with 70 to 80 percent gross margins against a service provider's 50 to 60, but what the spreadsheet misses is that services give you a front-row seat to how dozens of organizations actually work, and you get paid to learn over and over instead of betting the whole company on one product idea.

It is also, she notes, more diversified and stable, and a quiet secret is that many pure-SaaS companies run large professional-services arms because they need them to make the product work in the real world. Competing against giant outsourcing shops with thousands of engineers, her edge is that someone looking for a hundred people is not her client. Her clients want a founder's mind, real skin in the game, and craftsmanship, the difference between an IKEA table and one from the small workshop down the street. Sometimes IKEA is the right call, she says, and sometimes it is not.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

There is no top, only the next goal. Chasing a summit is chasing an end. Goals should keep coming, but the peak is a story that makes the fear bigger, not the work better.

A winding path is training, not a flaw. Every reset that forces you to be a beginner again builds exactly the muscle running a company requires: surviving chaos and building with no guarantee.

Co-leadership is coexistence. Sharing the role is not about power. It is about being genuinely replaceable so you can step back through the good and bad times.

Smaller can be the right call. Boldare cut from 200 to 100 to restore quality and leadership. The bigger number looked better on LinkedIn but was worse to run.

Services are underrated. They pay you to learn how dozens of organizations work, diversify your risk, and reward craftsmanship, even if SaaS margins look sexier on a slide.

Frameworks worth stealing

Goals without a summit

Keep setting goals, because without them you are lost, but refuse to frame any of them as a top you arrive at and stop. Treat success as a road you stay on, which keeps the fear and the ego in check and keeps you building rather than defending a peak.

Shrink to restore quality

When fast growth plus a shaky operating system erodes leadership and service quality, treat a downturn as a chance to clean the system rather than a failure to hide. A smaller, tighter team with higher standards can beat a bigger one that only looks good on paper.

Look at the data, not the person

For the genuinely hard calls like layoffs, borrow the doctor's mechanism: at the decision moment, work from the data and the counsel of people around you, never alone, so you can act without being paralyzed. If it ever stops hurting, that is the signal to stop doing it.

The workshop, not the warehouse

If you cannot win on scale, do not try. Win on the founder's mind, real skin in the game, and craftsmanship. Some buyers want the giant outsourcing shop, and some want the small workshop, so position clearly for the ones who want the latter.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

The concept of the top is really difficult for me. It doesn't exist, and I don't want to be there.

This "all over the place" is exactly what prepared me to run a company.

We chose to be smaller, with higher standards, instead of 200 that looked good on LinkedIn.

And the reframe on partnership every founder should sit with.

People think about power. I think about coexistence in the bad and the good times.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here is how Anna handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? She does not listen to advisors, and says the best thing she receives is simply being close to friends and family.

What would you tell your younger self? Never again allow yourself to end up in a company surrounded by people you would not hire today. Never step away from recruitment.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Winning new customers in an ultra-competitive worldwide market. She genuinely loves the problem, even when the answer is elusive.

Favorite spot? Banda in Warsaw. Tiny, no reservations, tiny portions of a constantly changing menu. She says it is impossible to explain, so just go.

Tool you can't live without? Peec AI, which she checks every morning to see how LLMs position her market and brand.

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Anna Zarudzka is the co-CEO of Boldare, a fully digital product design and development company that runs on holacracy, and the founder of the Boldare Foundation and a democratic elementary school. She previously worked in television production. Find her on LinkedIn or at boldare.com.