A year full of trying things

Up until last week, my wife and I were software engineers at Asana. We’ve decided to take some time off from the conventional full-time startup lifestyle, and to find and design the kind of life we’d like to have, from first principles.

One of our goals is to document our experience over the next few months, and our goodbye announcement to the company seemed like an appropriate thing to share first.

Sometimes Annie and I overwhelmed by how lucky we are.

- To have found someone we each love spending all our time with.

- To have found something we love doing.

- To have found such amazingly talented and constantly self-improving peers.

So it’s very difficult for us, but we’ve decided to do something scary: we’re leaving Asana for a year. We’ll be moving back to Canada (our home and native land), to take some time to learn, create, and experience. To make space and time (space-time?) to do things that we talk about but never get around to. To:

- Figure out what it means to be an aunt and uncle

- Write a compiler from scratch

- Bake ALL the bread!

- Make containers that have scales built in

- Create a smell-based dating site

- Try a hundred other different, terrible ideas

- Find and explore what opportunities exist, and choose among them intentionally

Asana is the very best place we’ve ever worked. And it’s hard to be leaving when things are so exciting. But timing is never perfect, and we don’t want to let perfection get in the way of taking action. That, and we totally expect that we’ll be back at Asana before the year is up.

I’m still looking for ways to best articulate the feelings that compelled us to make this change. I think this is a good start: if I had to program an AI that shared my exact values and life-goals, should I expect it to spend more than 1/3 of its waking hours working full-time?