It’s been two weeks since I left Shippo and it hasn’t been easy. Simple things like being connected to e-mail and holding on to my laptop waiting for it to be de-provisioned hasn’t let me completely unplug, but I have been managing to keep myself busy. I appreciate that opportunities to disconnect from your career are rare so I am looking forward to making the most of it.
What’s on my list?
- Get back to working on home systems - The past 7 years I have been almost exclusively working in and on multi-million dollar cloud environments, but my roots are back in the 90’s when you could stroll into a store and pick out games, pc parts or accessories with only a one time cost attached. The cloud is amazing, but takes some of the joy out of tinkering yourself and can eat a hobbyist’s wallet rather quickly.
- Build something - 3 1/2 of the past 7 years have been in executive roles where direct execution is sometimes required, but objectively not the aim. The growth I found was in the people rather than technology, but I continued to play around in my spare time. Building for the sake of building was where I started my career and it’s something I have felt disconnected from lately.
- Rethink my workflow - I have had the fortunate experience of living through the tech hype cycles since the 90’s, but other than information gathering purposes largely stay out of them. The latest AI cycle feeling a bit different to me not because of what is currently happening, but the general trend since I started to somewhat pay attention to in 2017. It’s fun, it’s interesting and there is enough there that I have played with in my spare time to see how it can enhance performance of a user.
- Network - I hope to most importantly network in a tough market. I am still hungry to learn and lead within an organization, but find myself wanting a narrower set of opportunities (unsurprisingly). My career has led to be places I really could only dreamed of at the start and the experiences I have garnered along the way make me feel like a capable leader, but I expect my standards for the right balance between mission, culture, technology and people will be a challenge to time right.
At minimum, I am hoping the next 6 months will unlock new levels of creativity for myself and allow me to remove internal biases and gain new perspectives from a wonderful experience leading Shippo’s R&D organization.