Pick Your Poison: the functioning addict at the top
Ian Koniak was a top global performer at Salesforce while hiding a twenty-year sex addiction. This one is heavy, and worth it.
Ian was a top global performer at Salesforce, closing monster deals by day. By night he was, his words, the definition of a functioning addict: strip clubs, porn, webcams, a double life that ran for about twenty years. One Dreamforce evening he snuck out on the executives he was hosting at a concert to hit a strip club, then hosted them again the next morning like nothing happened.
The confession part is what gets me. Before he told his wife, he went back through years of credit card and bank statements to reconstruct every secret incident, so he could confess all of it at once. He calls it the hardest thing in the world. She left for a while. Then she decided to give him another chance.
He's six and a half years sober now, through twelve steps and a faith conversion he says rewired his values overnight. These days he runs an Inc. 5000 sales coaching company and basically spends his life being the opposite of the tech-bro culture he used to represent.
“I was the definition of a functioning addict, if you want to call it that.”
What stayed with me
- He kept a compulsive double life running for twenty years at the peak of his sales career.
- During Dreamforce he snuck out on the executives he was hosting, then hosted them again the next morning.
- He reconstructed years of secret behavior from bank and credit card statements before confessing everything to his wife.
- Six and a half years sober through a twelve-step program; now he coaches salespeople.