Why the frequent career moves?
Startups are hard.
If you're reading this, you've got my resume and are concerned enough about the brief tenures at my recent companies to click a link and read more about them in detail. You're not alone; it's a very understandable concern, and I'm asked about it enough to feel this handy look at each of my recent transitions was worth writing.
The bottom line is: I'm not a job-hopper, startups are just volatile. I jumped into startups after 4 years at Sony, accepting risk in order to challenge myself and accelerate my learning in areas not possible at a big company. Plans, teams, and markets change fast though; only 3-in-10 startups raise a Series A, and roughly 1-in-10 of those raise a Series B. As a result, I've been put in a couple positions where moving on more quickly than intended was the only good option. I've seen a lot of right, wrong, and in-between, but learned an incredible amount along the way.
The Pinger story
After building a strong Marketing foundation over 4 years at Sony, I was ready for a new challenge and wanted to learn how a great startup approaches Marketing. Pinger was an established leader in the mobile messaging space, and afforded me the opportunity to learn directly from an incredible CMO who wanted to put me at the fore of some aggressive organizational growth plans. I was fine commuting to San Jose from SF (~4 hrs/day) for this. However, when the CMO left the company and the founders elected not to bring on a comparable replacement, that learning opportunity evaporated and the commute was no longer worth it, so I took another offer.
The Fleksy story
Fleksy had an awesome team, a product with traction and clear product/market fit, tough new challenges for me to solve, and a big vision. I was excited when they expressed a desire for me to significantly scale up their Marketing efforts. In practice though, the company wasn't really ready to invest in Marketing to a meaningful degree financially, and after our Extensions launch had minimal Design/Engineering bandwidth to devote to Marketing for the foreseeable future, leaving me feeling like my impact was being limited. Thus, when my Pinger CMO began aggressively recruiting me for a new role where I could have a larger impact, I opted (after much deliberation) to join him. Fleksy was acquired shortly after.
The Flint story
Flint's case is a frustrating one. The company was in an exciting spot - they had the best card processing technology in the Payments space, and had just signed major channel distribution partnerships with First Data, Vantive, and Apple with clear potential to exponentially boost their growth. It was also a chance for me to keep learning from a CMO I liked learning from and who wanted to invest in me. Unfortunately, unexpected product complications turned launching the First Data/Vantive programs from a quick 1 month dev cycle into a 6+ month dev cycle, and Apple's program, which was supposed to launch in mid 2015, didn't get off the ground in earnest until just recently. As a result, we weren't able to raise a new round of funding in Winter 2015 and the company ultimately died, which obviously forced a move on my part.
The Breezeworks story
Breezeworks was another frustrating case, in which (really impressive) growth was derailed by unexpected circumstances, resulting in a challenging fundraising cycle and my role, and others, being cut. About 1.5 months after I joined Breezeworks, our Head of Engineering was recruited away by Slack, taking with him our Android development team, causing a stagnation in our product development cycle. We continued to make a lot of progress in driving double-digit monthly growth and solid unit economics improvements, but just couldn't hit the product milestones we needed to in order to fundraise.
If I join your company, it will be with the intent of building something great over multiple years. Now we can focus on the important stuff: your company, and how I can help take your Marketing to the next level. So, ready to talk?