A little over the last two years of my live has been devoted to building, funding, and growing SimpleGeo. The experience was, without a doubt, life changing in many ways. It was a crash course in a bunch of disciplines that I knew little to nothing about. Managing clients, iterating on your product, sales, business development, raising money from investors, etc. were all wide open holes in need to my attention and input. It goes without saying that this was not an easy endeavor.
Along with being constantly challenged and learning new things, I was fortunate enough to work with some of the brightest engineers in Silicon Valley. While at SimpleGeo I saw them build a patent-pending distributed graph database built on top of theory that had not been implemented yet in the real world. At scale no less. The operations team built an infrastructure that was scarily automated and resistant to failure. So much so that the SimpleGeo engineers get regular calls to talk about how we did it all on top of AWS.
On October 31st, we announced that we’d been acquired by Urban Airship. I’m extremely excited to see what the combined teams cook up in the coming months. Having locationally aware push notifications is going to allow businesses to engage with their customers in ways they’ve never dreamed. Additionally, I know SimpleGeo’s world class engineering team will be able to help the new company build features at scale that the competition won’t be able to match. The best is truly yet to come from this company and I’m sure Scott Kveton will be a great shepherd moving forward.
As for me, I’ve decided to move on post-acquisition. I need to step away from the echo chamber and spend time focusing on what is important to me in general; not just professionally. To that end, my lovely lady and I have bought an RV and plan on touring around the Southwest this winter. I’d like to visit as many incubators and coworking places as possible. So if you’re in the Southwest and want me to swing by and say hello, please drop me a line on Twitter or via email.
Onward and upwards.