“Sure just call me.”
I had left Peek and started the CTO job at Reality Check. The old team was still working through a mobile-network integration I had owned, and something in the routing path was not behaving.
The request came in near the end of the day. Could I guide two people through it that night or the next morning?
The technical question involved authentication traffic that was not reaching the right server. The team could see part of the route but did not understand why another address needed to change. They had enough information to know where they were stuck, not enough to get unstuck quickly.
I did not send a long diagnosis from my phone. I told them to call.
Leaving a startup rarely creates a clean line. The job changes immediately. The systems do not. A vendor still has the old diagrams. A teammate remembers that you were the person on the last troubleshooting call. The work keeps its own history even after the org chart changes.
I also cared about Peek. The financing trouble was why I left, not because I wanted the product or the people to fail. I had moved to New York for that company. Seven months was not long, but it was enough to feel responsible for the things I had put in place.
Reality Check had plenty of its own work waiting. I was learning a new hosting environment, reviewing the network, and figuring out how a fifteen-person company operated. Helping the old team had to fit around that.
For this one, it could.
The cleanest answer was a phone call, a quick explanation, and a chance for the people still there to keep moving without turning the evening into a larger escalation.
I was not at Peek anymore. My number still worked.