The Last 2 Months

It’s been 2 months since I left my last role, and I wanted to share some highlights and stats about what I’ve been up to because it’s been far from boring.

On the job front… First, I’ve been talking with some amazing companies and I’m starting to learn more about where I want to go next and what I want to do. I’ve found that data companies, leveraging the modern data stack, to be super interesting because they’re helping to solve next level problems that go beyond what Looker and more traditional BI tools provide. If you know of any early-stage companies, I would love to talk with them, even if they’re not in the data space. Secondly, I’m seeing a consistent trend that Developer Tools are simplifying how applications are built by abstracting away repetitive development. This is super exciting because it means teams and companies are spending less time reinventing the wheel, and more time focusing on differentiating their product. Here’s a sample pitch for this type of company:

______ is a flexible, reliable ______ infrastructure that’s built to scale with you. Our APIs do ______, ______, and ______ , allowing you to ______ for your business and customers.

I think a long-term impact will be companies that GTM faster, and create more innovative solutions, which would be super exciting. Also, these types of consumption-based, SaaS tools ultimately reduce costs, which will be a win-win for companies in these economic times.

Lastly, Product Lead Growth (PLG), which we used to call self-service at DigitalOcean, is taking over the vernacular. For some companies it’s a buzz word, but for many, it’s the way to rapid growth. Grafana is a perfect example of this.

For myself, I’ve come to realize that one of my super powers is building customer-facing teams and processes in this type of high velocity environment. It’s exciting, challenging, and meaningful work to convert, onboard, and retain customers.

On a personal level, we (finally) moved into our house! It’s a townhouse built in 1840, located in downtown Portland, Maine. We spent the last 9 months working with a great GC doing a full renovation. Since I wasn’t working full-time, I spent over 100 hours at the house (yes, I counted) helping the contractors finish things up. Here are some other tidbits:

• 172 - most number of flights in a single day my Apple Watch logged
• 6 Tons of concrete, old bricks and dirt removed by hand and wheelbarrow from the backyard. 1st time using a dump truck on the 5 trips to the dump
• 2 hidden doors built into the house and 6 pocket doors installed
• 8 hours - how long it too me to assemble our cabinets/closets from Ikea. We used both Sektion and Pax for two variations of our closets. There are pros and cons to both
• Speaking of Ikea, it took 2 trips + 1 delivery to get the components we needed
• 1 Ikea vanity hacked to fit the sink we wanted (AMA, I love Ikea)
• 2 days - the time it took for the Reform shipment of missing kitchen handles from Vilnius, Lithuania to Portland. BTW - reform cabinets are gorgeous and we’re super happy with our choices
• 1 house warming party and 3 days of post-party isolation with Covid symptoms 😭
• If you’re thinking about a renovation, I highly recommend it. It took 1.5 years from purchase to full move-in, but it was a perfect pandemic distraction.

Here are some photos of the (mostly) finished product and a few in progress shots all taken in the past 60 days: ![old kitchen](