Goggles down to look around

After nearly 7 fantastic years working at Adobe and substantial landscape changes, I felt the overwhelming urge to recenter my work and look at the map as a whole with free hands and open eyes. I handed in my resignation in December. After a brief trip to Europe and some rest I’m spending my time on these transformed personal and professional landscapes.

The last 10 years have been an incredible Silicon Valley Journey with my wife Jen…

Personal Landscape

• We moved from SF to (real?) “Silicon Valley” in Sunnyvale and then to our mountain home in Kings Mountain/Woodside (cool treehouse shown above)
• We had and partially (pasture?) raised our two wonderful (if occasionally chaotic) children and I became an uncle twice (and soon 3x) over.
• I worked in “Big tech” for the first time at Adobe (vs Jen’s veteran 6th)
• We both got to see the forefront of the XR/Immersive (AR/VR) industries from up close at Adobe and Meta
• We made a range of angel investments, some of which are proving successful!
• We finally got to participate in our first serious IPO

The technology sector also shifted dramatically

• XR hardware at 100M user scale (which is HARD) ended up being a lot longer journey than industry predictions back in 2017/18
• Generative AI transformed the codebases, interfaces and correspondingly, the work of engineers, designers, product managers alike. It may shortly transform work as a whole, the way companies and markets are architected and even global society whole.

An amazing time working on Adobe Aero and Aero Geospatial / Google Maps Geospatial Creator

Adobe was a tremendous employer and it’s impossible to express my gratitude to all the people involved, I would strongly recommend them to all comers. My thanks stretches far and wide into the industry also - with the incredible folks at both Google and Qualcomm who I had the chance to partner with on a bunch of awesome things that set up a bright future.

I do, in particular, want to thank my manager and superstar mentor Chantel Benson for her endless inspiration and patience through this extremely formative, productive and even transformational time in my life.

Looking outward

I get to look anew at the landscapes from the fortunate position of great freedom as well as better evaluation, learning and prototyping tools than ever before. I mean to utilize this immense privilege well.

People sometimes ask me for advice re developing their business strategy muscles and my first bit of advice is always to put skin in the game and take bets and make predictions. (Credit to Brent Long for teaching me how to run a predictions book with friends).

Accordingly, I’m spending a lot of time “tech investing”, working on angel investments (both current and new), having conversations about the technology landscape and experimenting with options investments as a way to better express my stances.

Also (“movement and stillness”?) - a little skiing, hiking, gardening, reading and yes we may even finally throw some parties again!

Best wishes to all those on journeys old and new!