At 8:30 one morning Brett Chell was the CEO of a company he'd spent thirteen years and $53 million building. By 9 he'd been told not to go back to his house, not to speak to a single employee, phone off, computer off. They towed his Escalade. His visa was attached to the job. He walked out of downtown Houston with a backpack.

Brett dropped out of high school and spent eight years on oil rigs. What he also saw was a problem nobody was solving: operators running hundred-million-dollar sites from headquarters half a country away, getting their data emailed to them piecemeal by a dozen service companies who had no interest in talking to each other. He figured software couldn't be that hard. Thirteen years and $53 million later, he had his answer. The company he built is still running, doing $50–60 million a year with 250 employees. He was removed from it right as it hit escape velocity.

What followed was sixty days of Domino's and Netflix with his phone off, then a year of trying to work out who he was without a company name to lead with. His lawyer told him he'd win the fight for his equity — two years, half a million in fees, roughly $20 million in warrants on the table. He let all of it go, because taking it wasn't who he wanted to be on the other side.

Then he sat at a kitchen table and wrote down what he actually loved. Supercars. Art. Being around his friends. Marketing. He flew to Salt Lake, drove the city in a grid for two weeks writing down addresses of interesting buildings, walked into the first one, and met the man redeveloping the entire neighborhood. The warehouse he ended up with had gravel floors, smashed windows, rain coming through the roof, and people living inside it. He took it because it was the only one he could afford.

That's Bricks: a business club, a car club, and a media house in one building, built on the observation that most coworking spaces sell community and deliver a room full of strangers who never speak. His fix is curation plus actual services — pooled media production, distribution, and a network members can use.

This is a conversation about what happens when the thing you built stops being yours, and what you're left with. Brett is unusually honest about the role ego played in staying too long, about how much of his earlier success he now attributes to timing rather than talent, and about the difference between the CEO a small company needs and the one a large company needs — a distinction he understood about himself and ignored.

His line for anyone whose identity has quietly merged with their work: "I ask people, who are you? Not what you do."