the onda

So the news is out: two and a half years after having been acquired, I am leaving HP. It is with mixed emotions that I do so— as there are still great folks from Tabblo I'll no longer get to see (as well as a host of other solid people I've met while at HP).

HP itself has treated me very well over the last couple of years, seemingly able to head off any incipient complacency by giving me a new challenge every six months. While here I've had the good fortune to work on large-scale web services, all manner of smartphone projects, platform architectures, and perhaps best of all, to see the Tabblo team never meet a challenge they couldn't overcome, whether it was ridiculous deadlines, moving-target deliverables, or the crushing weight of a very large bear that "just wants a hug."

I've also learned something incredibly valuable about how new technologies are perceived and adopted across big companies, thanks to the CTO opportunity I got to have this last year. At $112B and 300K employees, HP is as big as they get in technology, thus facing a set of challenges when entering any market or absorbing any sort of new technology into their product lines that would baffle the most sophisticated of systems thinkers. Having experienced this first hand has made me much more aware of the role of startups in an ecosystem that contains both them and giants like HP, IBM, Apple, and even eventually Google, as well as some of the misconceptions (both positive and negative) that even experienced entrepreneurs who haven't spent the time in the guts of one of these aircraft carriers can fall prey to (I'll be writing more on that in coming posts).

Why am I leaving? The timing just feels right. In last two and a half years we've seen the launch of the next major wave in personal computing (with the iPhone and associated devices), the broad-based acceptance of the cloud as a true platform (with everything from data APIs to compute cycles available to programmers big and small), and an accelerating rate of acceptance around all sorts of facets of personal publishing and personal commerce that astounds even me. It's time to dive back into that stream— if for no other reason than because it just looks too damned fun.

And finally, what am I doing? Enjoying the holiday break for starters. Relaxing a little while I put some thought into what this next chapter looks like. And hopefully, blogging more.

Thanks HP.