I moved to New York for a startup job that lasted about seven months.
Peek made a small, dedicated mobile device for email and messaging. The idea was simple enough to explain, but the service behind the device depended on reliable managed connectivity and infrastructure. I began working with the company in late summer 2009 after three years at Beatport.
I introduced agile methods and helped build Peek's first physical data centers to augment its cloud infrastructure. Then the funding ran short. By March 2010, the organization was forced to move on.
That was how I described it in a cover letter that December. We did real work, and the company still ran out of money. The role lasted seven months.
I moved quickly. In March I became CTO of Reality Check Network. The business made infrastructure the product. In a December cover letter, I described the scope as roughly 1,400 servers, a team of twelve, and seven data centers, with operations across New Jersey, Amsterdam, and San Jose.
We worked on scalability in the hosting systems and in the way the engineers and administrators operated. It was a large remit, and another short chapter.
When I first came to New York, I had applied to Shutterstock for a technical project-management position and received an offer. I turned it down because the role did not fit what I wanted. I was looking for a position with more responsibility and direct ownership of technology operations.
I kept in touch with somebody I knew inside Shutterstock and kept hearing good things about the company. By September, there was a director role in systems operations that lined up with the work I had been doing and the responsibility I wanted. I wrote that I could bridge the gaps between technology and business, build teams, and solve the infrastructure problems created by growth. The language was confident. It needed to be. I was asking them to look past two short startup chapters and see a pattern of taking on larger systems.
Shutterstock hired me in October 2010.
Two months later, I described the year to an old connection as "startup hopping" around New York, building relationships and rebuilding technology teams. I called Shutterstock a kick-ass growing organization. I put the company at about 160 people then, with plans to grow substantially the next year.
I was also building another thing on the side.
I had pulled together a small group of programmers around an idea called OpsDojo. We wanted one interface for managing data-center and cloud infrastructure, a common tool set for automating physical resources and virtual instances. The plan was to launch a beta into the open-source community. I was excited enough to tell people that we were getting ready to make some waves.
At the end of 2010, that was the actual status: a new director job, two short startup roles behind me, and an infrastructure-management side project that we hoped to turn into an open-source beta.
For now, I am at Shutterstock. The team is growing and there is a lot to do. Ops Dojo remains a plan on the side while I learn the systems and take on the rebuilding work in the new job.