This isn’t just a reference to an 80’s hairband song, I have decided to go to work for another startup company. It was just over a year ago when we sold Choose and I took my previous role. When I joined that company I expected to be there for a while. I was given a position to lead the architecture of a new system that had been built by a consulting company to replace a legacy system. Technology wise there were a lot of great decisions made with the new architecture that they had. It was a modern Spring Boot stack, composed of micro services.

I dove into it and started learning the businesses domain. As things sometimes happen in the fall there was a shakeup with the leadership which resulted in the CTO who hired me leaving in January. I was on vacation at the time and I had called into the meeting and heard that announcement. As I sat there thinking about that I was thinking given the trends that were going on, it wasn’t feeling like the culture of the new leadership was compatible with my workstyle. I started thinking about what should I do next.

Out of the blue that afternoon I get a text from my friend Kevin whom I had worked with at Choose. He and another former coworker and friend of mine had started a venture capital fund. Kevin mentioned that they were in talks with a company that they were considering funding and he would like to introduce me to the CEO as he felt like we would work together. After a great initial meeting, I then started doing some meetings with the rest of the team. I was really intrigued by the team at this point. They had a big vision and all around seemed like amazing people to work with.

As things happen the whole fund raising thing takes a great deal of time and I started feeling like maybe it wasn’t going to come together so I started considering some other opportunities as the situation with the leadership at my former company kept deteriorating. My manager left to take a new role, and he was absolutely amazing.

In May the conversation around what we would be working on and my role resumed and we were finally able to get a planned worked out and an offer accepted by the end of June. At that point though I already had my summer travel planned for July so we planned on getting started when I got back from our travel. Once again we had an issue though in that I was rear ended in our minivan and the body shop didn’t repair it in time for us to start our travels up to Minnesota and Wisconsin. We would have been left with just 4 days up there and 4 days of travel which sounded like a nightmare when doing a 1000 mile road trip with 4 children. At that point I requested pushing out my start date another week so that we could have a proper vacation and that wasn’t a problem so we headed north and spent a wonderful couple of weeks with my family.

We headed back to Texas and I finished up my last week of work, and finally at the end of July I started my new role. This is the first time in my career that I was the first engineering hire and this is the earliest stage in a start up that I have ever been able to work on. I just finished up my 4th week of work (I had intended to write this in the first couple of days but I have been too busy to get to it until now), and it has been an amazing ride already. Although I have only been there a month it feels like so much has happened already. I am just excited to be building a new company again and to be diving into amazing architecture and implementation work on a new product.