Two Hours Before the Biggest Presentation of My Life… The Server Crashed
San Diego.
Perfect weather. Good coffee. Polished slides.
About 10 years ago, I spent six months building this SaaS product—mapping flows, refining UX, sweating over every pixel like it was going on display at the Louvre.
This was the launch.
Live demo. Full room. The company’s yearly sales meeting.
(Imagine an Apple keynote… if Apple sold educational publishing software.)
And two hours before we went on stage…
The server died.
Not a little hiccup. Not a “try turning it off and on.”
Gone. Offline. Vanished into the void like it owed someone money.
The only two people who knew?
Me… and the VP of Marketing, Harry.
We locked eyes.
Four seconds of silent panic.
And then, without a word, we both did what real teams do:
We got to work.
Slack messages flew.
Text threads exploded.
VPNs fired up. SSH access. Devs on standby like we were about to launch a SpaceX rocket from a hotel nightstand.
I’m half in a suit, hunched over my laptop, looking like I’m trying to hack the Pentagon with hotel Wi-Fi. Every few minutes, I’d glance at Harry and give the universal “not yet” head shake.
T-minus 10 minutes to showtime…
The devs pull off a miracle.
Server’s back.
Database steady.
Product loads like nothing ever happened.
We walk on stage cool as cucumbers.
No one has any idea the whole product was held together with duct tape, stress, and three Red Bulls just minutes earlier.
The demo? Flawless.
The response? Standing ovation.
And as we walked off stage, Harry looked over at me smirks and says:
“Well… I’m glad we didn’t have the lead-off spot.”
Here’s what I learned:
Leadership isn’t about avoiding fires.
It’s about staying calm while everything’s burning and nobody’s found the fire extinguisher yet.
And calm—is contagious.
When I first heard Rorke Denver speak at Leadercast—a real-deal Navy SEAL—he said something that rewired my brain:
“Calm is contagious.”
It stuck.
Because panic is contagious too.
And stupid? Exceptionally contagious.
But calm… calm buys you time. It earns trust. It brings everyone’s heart rate down just enough to make room for a solution.
So next time the server crashes, the slide deck corrupts, the internet dies, or your plans fall apart 5 minutes before go time…
Stay calm.
It’ll never not serve you well.
Promise.
