Unemployed
So now that most of my coworkers know, I feel I can announce it here. As of next week I'll no longer be working for my current employer. On Monday my boss and I had a long impromptu meeting about my role in the organization, which resulted in another meeting with the head of the company and we all decided it was probably best to separate amicably now rather than continue in the direction things had been heading. The decision was sudden, but not unexpected.
As with everything on this weblog, I'll try to be as honest about it as I can. What happened is that *my* project blew up during the summer - 100% my fault, I have lots of excuses if you want to hear them, but that's the crux of it - and as we refocused to get the product out the door, my role in the project and company became marginalized. I never really fit well in the organizational structure anyways, but after not shipping it was hard to get any momentum back. After a short while me leaving the company became the obvious path. It's not like I wasn't working my ass off, however - there's still a lot of my blood, sweat and ideas in that project - so I'll be wrapping up with no hard feelings and good recommendations, etc. And I still think the company (not named here for Google reasons) is a great place to work filled with really cool people and anyone that's heard me talk about what they are doing there knows how enthusiastic I am about it. Look for some interesting things to be (finally) launched soon.
Thus I'm now a "Free Agent" (or soon will be) which is code for Unemployed. Call Odd Todd. Lots of options for sure, and we'll see how much opportunity shows up as a result of this post. I would've rather have had one job in hand before moving on to the next, but this is how things went, so now I'll scramble a little bit and hopefully things will work out. It'd be just my life to be chatting up various successful techie gazillionaires one weekend and be homeless the next, wouldn't it?
I'm actually quite jazzed about the change. I've got about six weeks before things start to get tight, so I'm going to do my best to shop around my latest and great mobile idea and see if I can get funding of some sort to get it moving. It's a project based on Mobile Content, which I'm very excited about. I'm going to try to crank out a demo, write up a business plan, and use as many connections as I can to get it in front of the right eyes. As much as I liked working for my old company, I've been dying to start my own gig for years. I think my understanding of the industry and the technology is as good as anyone's (or better) and I think being able to set direction would improve my chances of success enormously.
If I can't get anyone to help pay my bills for a while I build the next world-changing mobile technology, I'll just have to see what's available out on Craig's List. Who knows, I may end up contracting hourly doing Visual Basic or something horrible like that, but hopefuly it'll be something more interesting. The Valley seems to be revving up, so I've got high hopes.
If you know of something cool and mobile, please send it my way.
-Russ