One Year Post-Google

Last weekend marked my one year anniversary of leaving Google. So, with that said, here's my one year re-cap!

What have I been doing?

EmptySpaceAds: I joined EmptySpaceAds as its VP of Engineering, where I helped to relaunch our product. We've created a brand new (and pretty fantastic, if you ask me) way of showing ads. Our product helps a website owner actually generate revenue from the margins of their page, while still maintaining a clean and organized page. "Use it, don't lose it", we like to say.

CareerCup: When I left Google, I knew that I needed to take some time to re-do CareerCup. The design was a mess, the code didn't scale and, frankly, there wasn't even the slight glimmer of revenue. I'm thrilled to say that that's all changed. I've got a brand new design (courtesy of someone I found via 99designs.com), I've re-written the code on Google App Engine, and it's finally generating some revenue. It's still not everything I want it to be, but it's getting better.

Seattle Anti-Freeze: Seattle Anti-Freeze is my other side venture that I don't talk about as much. In short, we organize parties and events for young professionals in Seattle. Shortly after leaving Google (and finally getting some precious free time), I wrote a new online ticketing system. It's nothing fancy or innovative, but it saves us oh-so-much time.

What have I learned?

If there's one thing I've learned in the last year, it's that you don't have to do it all yourself. Yes, I discovered the wonder of outsourcing. I hired an amazing remote assistant, who has saved me precious hours. She does document editing, graphic design, and a plethora of other technical tasks. Why didn't I know about this before?

Where am I going?

I alluded to this earlier, but I am indeed leaving Seattle to move back to Philadelphia. I will be attending Wharton's MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania, where I plan to focus on entrepreneurship.

In the meantime, I hope to finally get the chance to play around with some other projects. There's still a bunch to do on CareerCup, and I have some new ideas I'm playing around with. I'd like my newest project, PictureMash, to support group accounts, and I'd like to evolve Seattle Anti-Freeze's site into a general purpose ticketing / event site so that other organizations can use it.

So much to do, so little time!