The Next Chapter
I recently stepped down as CEO of Infochimps. You can read my post on the Infochimps blog here. It has been an incredible experience and I look forward to my continued involvement, though I’m also excited about the next chapter.
My wife, Elizabeth, and I will be moving to Boston in January. Yes, it will be cold, but we will be close to family and the Boston startup scene is thriving with hundreds of startups and ~ 40 active VC funds. In the first week of Decmeber (which isnt even over), six area companies have received a total of $85 million in funding and three have been acquired.* I won’t compare Boston to Austin or the Bay Area because I’m not yet familiar enough with it, but also because as I’ve often said, each market is unique. I plan on diving in and making it my new home, as I did with Austin back in 2003.
Austin was a wonderful place for me and I’ll leave with fond memories. The University of Texas supported me when I was running my first startup while in law school, and the startup community adopted me when I chose to stay in Austin instead of going back to NYC to practice law.
In 2007, Bryan Jones, now at Collider Media, and I brought OpenCoffeeClub to Austin and Damon Clinkscales, the godfather of Austin on Rails, has revived it. Thanks Damon! I feel privileged to have helped Josh Dilworth when he spun out of Portner Novelli to start what’s now by far the best tech PR firm in Austin (not just because my wife heads up new business there), and he in turn introduced me to the guys who would recruit me as a cofounder at Infochimps. Thanks Josh! My transition from law back to a startup was made easier thanks to the support I got from my mentors Matt Lyons at Andrews Kurth, Paull Pellman at Adometry, Bill Boebel who recently left Rackspace, and Rick Wittenbraker and Andy Jenks at Stage 1 Capital. I made plenty of mistakes but would’ve made a lot more if not for these guys.
I’m also glad to have spent the better part of this past year in the Bay Area, where I made a lot of friends and met a lot of people who are building incredible things, as well as those that provide the capital to make that possible. There are really too many to list, but I’d like to give a special nod to Anthony Goldbloom at Kaggle, Semil Shah contributor at Techcrunch, Steve DeWald who founded datamarketplace.com and is now at Square, Mike Olson at Cloudera, Daniel Jacobson at Netflix, Adam d’Augelli at True, Ryan Spoon at Polaris, and Beezer Clarkson and Marta Buliach at DFJ.
I’m taking some time off to decide what to commit myself to next, but to keep myself busy I’m building simple CRM software I could’ve used during our wedding planning process. You can sign up to be notified when it launches at http://signup.weddingrm.com. Katie Rae at Techstars Boston graciously offered me some coworking space, which is where I’ll be hacking away beginning in January. See you in Cambridge and I’m sure I’ll be back to Austin and the Bay Area often!
*Data from VentureFizz
