Blist

Starting in early June, I'm working at blist, an early-stage startup located in Seattle. Their product is a web application that makes databases easy to create and share; check out the web site for more information.

I had a great three years at Amazon, but I was getting eager to do something new, and to get back into the small-company world. This happened a little sooner than I'd planned, sice the founder of blist contacted me last month with a opportunity that seemed to good to pass up. Among other cool things, I will be the fourth Mudder at blist (out of about 12 employees); the others are Paul Paradise '03, Jeff Scherpelz '04, and Jonathan Beall '07 (as an intern).

I broke the news to my team yesterday. This was a bit difficult, because the developer who's been on the team for the second-longest time (after me) also announced yesterday that he's leaving Amazon in June. So I feel even worse for my teammates than I expected, but, well, these things happen and the team has survived plenty of similar changes before. The hard part is that I really like my teammates, and that was the main thing that kept me at Amazon this long. If you like your work for its meaning or the challenge or the pay, then it's your own loss if you quit. But if you like it because you have great co-workers that you get along with really well, then you feel responsible for their feelings too.

I mentioned to the junior member of our team—a college hire from this fall—that I think everyone should experience working in both a big company and a small company. In either environment, you can learn and do things that you can't in the other. Right now I've learned all I was ready to learn from Amazon, and now I want to apply it somewhere where I can hopefully make a bigger impact.