About a month ago I changed jobs, leaving Apture to join a start-up in a completely different space: Lookout, Inc.. While I won’t delve too deeply into my reasons for leaving, my reasons for joining were almost entirely driven by the team. I was fortunate enough to meet with Kevin and John (CTO and CEO respectively) through a mutual friend and some time after that Dave G., the tech lead for the server team. The more people I met from Lookout, the more I wanted to work there.
Unlike both Apture and Slide, Lookout is a Ruby shop which has presented a number of new and interesting challenges for me, most of which I’ll enumerate as the months go on. At this point, I must say the Python community has much that they/we could learn from subsections of the Ruby community. There seems to be an underlying ethos amongst Ruby hackers to make things simple and easier if possible, taking advantage of some of the unique features of the language to acheive this.
When I first mentioned this on Twitter, I felt very flattered that multiple people mentioned that they were “sure I would start up my thing after Apture.” In my own opinion, I still have much to learn before I would feel confident pitching potential investors and building a team from scratch. Founders are in it for the long-haul, and as such I think they should be 100% committed to making the product and team successful. I’m not there yet, but I’ll be there soon.