Wednesday, October 28, 2015

2008 Craziness

I was reading this article tonight about a tweetstorm from @pmarca about the financial crisis and it sparked a couple thoughts about that time for me.

First, it's hard to believe I'm at an age where something that seems so recent to me would be relative pre-history for someone of the age that could be a co-worker. But do the math and there you go.

Second, I was thinking of how crazy that time was and how crazy I was on top of it.

I was 6 months into a voluntary break from paid work exploring my own ideas/projects that I hoped would lead to my starting my own company. The financial system was collapsing. My wife was 7 months pregnant. I was actually feeling hopeful in that I thought they would let more fail than they did. I was still a little more than a year away from hooking up with @jonathanmendez to start Yieldbot and more than 2 years away from that bringing my next paycheck. And on the biggest down day of the market I cobbled together what I could to make some strategic stock buys. (For better or worse) I haven't done any stock trading since.

Reflecting on all of that, I suppose it's no wonder I love the startup world; wherein you get that level of crazy on an ongoing basis.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

The Song Remains the Same

I've generally been way too busy to lift my head up and do any writing, which is probably something that won't change now. But I was amazed that my last post here was more than 4 years ago and I figured I could even say something random just so that wouldn't be true anymore.

In that time amazing things have happened at Yieldbot, including recently changing to needing 3 digits to count the number of employees in the company. More importantly than the number of people is the quality of the people, the amazing way they work together, and the great product that we've been able to build together.

A couple key things that have stayed the same over the last 4 years -

Yieldbot's mission. Everything feels like it's been an evolution, and my (admittedly brief) description of what we do doesn't need updating. This is a tribute to the original vision that @jonathanmendez had for what we do and how he's guided the ship the whole way.

Happily for me another thing that hasn't changed is I'm still the CTO; though the evolution of my role and what I do on a daily basis as we've scaled the company is hard to even believe. Maybe I'll talk more about it when I find the time.