Why I Left Apple to join Boon

date
Feb 28, 2025
slug
why-i-left-apple-to-join-boon
status
Published
tags
Tech
summary
After seven years at Apple, I joined Boon, a logistics AI startup, seeking greater growth potential and leveraging a team with deep domain expertise that knows how to sell what I know how to build
type
Post
When I interview candidates at my new company Boon, I always give them time at the end to ask questions. Without fail, almost everyone asks me the same thing: Why did I leave Apple to join a small startup?

The Apple Years

At the beginning of these interviews, I typically introduce myself - sharing my experience in the industry, previous projects I've built, and mentioning that I spent the last 7 years at Apple where I worked on various projects.
Given how often I'm asked why I left, I've developed a mental script that I can recite almost automatically.

Why I Left Apple

The simple answer? Growth potential.
Apple has grown tremendously since I joined in 2017. When I started, their stock price was around $38 (post-split). Today, it's approximately $230 – that's about a 5x growth in just 7 years. While impressive, I don't have confidence that Apple can achieve another 5x growth in the next 7 years.
Here's my thinking:
Apple now builds really good devices that people don't need to replace as frequently anymore. Think about the leap from iPhone 4 to iPhone 5 – it was such a dramatic improvement that everyone wanted to upgrade immediately. The same thing happened when Apple Silicon replaced Intel chips in MacBooks.
But I'm still using my MacBook M1, and it works perfectly fine. I don't feel any need to upgrade yet. This is actually a testament to Apple's quality, but ironically, it's not great for continued stock growth.
While Apple is focusing on growing its services business, I'm not convinced that will be enough to 5x the company's value in the next 5-7 years.

The Big Tech Dilemma

This growth ceiling isn't unique to Apple. If I joined another Big Tech company, they'd likely face the same challenge - they're already so large that dramatic growth becomes increasingly difficult.

Why Not Other Startups?

During my job search, I actually interviewed with five or six different startups across various industries:
  • A startup doing voice AI in healthcare
  • Another in home defense and security
  • Several startups working on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) stacks for enterprise, helping companies search and write documents
  • A few others in different spaces
I deliberately chose not to join these companies for specific reasons:
Security companies: Security often feels like an afterthought for most consumers - we don't typically buy security products because most of the time we feel safe enough. More importantly, I didn't want to be responsible if software I built accidentally harmed someone innocent. That would be terrible, and it's a responsibility I preferred to avoid.
Healthcare companies: Having spent a couple of years at Apple Health, I had firsthand experience with the challenges in this industry. FDA approval processes and selling to insurance companies create incredibly long sales cycles. It's a difficult space with many regulatory hurdles.
RAG stack companies: Everyone is building these right now. There are so many competitors in this space that I couldn't see how a single company could successfully compete against much larger players like OpenAI and Google Gemini, who are also building similar solutions.

Why I Chose Boon

For startups, the biggest challenge is finding product-market fit. You want to enter an industry with:
  1. A reasonable number of competitors (not zero, which would suggest no market)
  1. Not too many competitors
  1. A product with some competitive moat and velocity
What made Boon stand out to me was the team's domain expertise. The CEO and founder, Deepti, came from Samsara, a public company in the transportation and logistics industry. The team has been working in logistics for a while and really understands:
  • What to sell
  • Who to sell it to
  • How to sell it
Boon is building AI software to help logistics and transportation companies optimize their operations, and the team already has deep industry knowledge.
As an engineer, I'm confident in my ability to build things. What I can't necessarily do is sell. This makes for a perfect partnership: they know how to sell, and I know how to build.
My conversations with Deepti have been great, and I'm genuinely enjoying working with her. I believe Boon has the potential to become a major player in the industry within a few years. We just need to execute well.
And that's why I made the switch from Apple to Boon.

© Victor Augusteo 2021 - 2025