In January, four months after joining Beatport, I was promoted to lead the technology function.
The exact day is not preserved in the email archive, so this entry stands for the month rather than a ceremonial announcement. The evidence appears in the change itself. Early Beatport signatures call me the Network Administrator. By February, the signature reads Director of Information Technology. Contemporary resume records place the promotion in January 2007.
The title moved faster than my experience had time to feel comfortable with it. I was twenty-two. I knew servers, networks, Linux, Windows, mail systems, security, monitoring, and the physical work of putting infrastructure together. Leading the function added people, budgets, priorities, architecture, and the responsibility to decide which problem mattered before it became urgent.
Beatport was a good place to learn because the company was not standing still. An online music store has a storefront, but it also has content arriving from labels, files that need processing and storage, search and database systems, customer delivery, internal tools, and support. Growth applies pressure to every connection between those pieces.
My first months had been hands-on. I tested mail routes, queues, lists, shared addresses, external delivery, and vacation replies. I sourced drives. I learned the org chart and the systems behind it. The promotion did not remove that work. It made me accountable for the larger shape around it.
There is a tempting version of this story where somebody recognized obvious leadership and everything followed naturally. That is too clean. The better version is that a young company needed somebody to own a widening set of problems, and I was ambitious enough to say yes before I had seen all of them.
The opportunity was enormous. So was the gap between what I knew and what the company would soon require.
I took the title. Then I kept doing the technical work while learning, quickly and in public, how to lead the people and plans around it.