“We've done some crazy shit in nine months.”
The line went into the old email thread that had introduced me to Reonomy a year earlier. Reading it again felt like yesterday and a decade ago at the same time.
The original introduction described me as Shutterstock's VP of Technology Operations, somebody who was not actively looking but had a side interest in commercial real estate. I replied carefully. I did not want to put the cart before the horse or grab a giant title before I understood the company. There was a lot of data to gather first.
That first conversation eventually turned into leaving Shutterstock for Reonomy.
Nine months later, the job had touched almost everything. We had moved offices, rebuilt parts of the engineering organization, developed a new data-processing pipeline, worked toward Los Angeles, and started pushing Reonomy data into customer systems.
The year was messy too. The office move needed a weekend rescue. Product releases went out early. Urgent reports did not always match the actual problem. I paused one leadership plan, restarted the search later, and kept trying to build the structure around a team that was changing underneath it.
That was why the old thread felt so far away. The person writing it was still at a public company, describing the startups he had seen and saying he would be happy to learn more. He did not know he would be pulling cable as Reonomy's VP of Engineering a few months later.
I ended the new reply looking toward 2016: stronger team, focused vision, it is going to be great.
Nine months was not long. It was long enough for Reonomy to stop feeling like the company from the introduction.