The subject line was direct: “Beatport Offer.”
One week earlier, I had been invited to interview for a systems-administrator position at a small company on Broadway in Denver. I arrived the next afternoon. On September 25, the written offer reached my personal inbox with a request to call after I had reviewed it.
Beatport was two years old. The public product was an online store where DJs could buy downloadable tracks. Behind that storefront was the kind of systems problem I wanted: web servers, databases, storage, networks, email, content processing, and customers who could arrive at any hour from anywhere with an internet connection.
I had been looking broadly. The same month included thirteen applications, an interview process with an optics company, conversations about a television-gaming role, and an invitation to meet another Denver technology team. I had accepted a different systems position only two months earlier. The search was active because I was still trying to find the environment with the best combination of responsibility and room to learn.
Beatport was that environment, although I could not know the scale of it from the offer. I joined as a senior systems administrator. The early email trail is wonderfully unglamorous. There are hard-drive links, account tests, mail queues, vacation replies, mailing lists, and a company org chart sent as a Visio PDF. Startup infrastructure does not arrive as a finished platform. Somebody has to make each ordinary part work.
This offer began three years at Beatport. Within a few months I would be leading the technology function. Over time the environment would grow into hundreds of devices and a much larger storage and delivery operation. None of that belongs in the decision I made on September 25, because none of it was guaranteed.
The evidence for this day is smaller: one interview, one offer, and a young company selling music on the internet.
I said yes to the job. Then I started testing everything.