I felt fucking great.
The day before, I had officially put in notice at Reonomy. I had tried to leave once already, but the timing around the company and our mobile-home-park financing had pulled me back in. Three months later, I did it again. This time it held.
I was joining Aaptiv as CTO and VP Product.
The overlap made sense immediately. I cared a lot about fitness and wellness. I was already using the running, cycling, and meditation classes almost every day. The customer stories on the community page had become part of my morning routine, usually followed by an affirmation meditation while I walked to the train.
That morning I sent the founder a note with the subject line “Pumped.” I told him I was excited about connecting those customers to the value inside the app through community and technology. Fun and lucrative was my favorite combination.
I was already pulling apart the product. Fitness trackers collected plenty of data, but collection alone did not help somebody choose the next workout. A good recommendation could. Search, content metadata, and recommendation systems were problems I understood from Shutterstock and Reonomy, and they mapped cleanly onto a library of audio classes.
Mobile engineering was the part I did not know deeply enough yet.
I said that plainly. One month would not turn me into a formidable mobile engineer. I could still learn the stack, build trust with the engineers, recruit well, and use a decade of experience to help the product and technology organization grow. My plan was to be honest about what I knew and where I needed to lean on the team.
The onboarding request was practical: source-code access, architecture diagrams, shared documents, the roadmap, and the person who could walk me through the system. Aaptiv set up email, Slack, Git, and introductions to the engineers before I had even finished at Reonomy.
There was also a bottle of scotch waiting for me, one that was somehow not already in my collection.
My safe start date was still a month away. I hoped to get out of Reonomy sooner, but I did not control that timing yet.
Decision made. I had a new product to learn, a new team to meet, and a lot of workouts to take.