Why I joined TribalScale
Wow! That was an exciting first week; this is my second week as a co-founder (read: put it all on the line) at TribalScale and man am I energized. For the last six years I’ve been playing it safe — I graduated university, joined an established engineering firm, then joined an established software development company. Now — I’m not sleeping, helping bootstrap a company, and putting it all on the line. Am I crazy? Definitely not. So why did I do it? Well, the short answer is I found a Tribe (in Seth Godin’s words). I found a group of people that share my same vision and passion for the possibilities that technology enables in all of our lives and together we think we can make exciting things happen.
“Many people are starting to realize that they work a lot and that working on stuff they believe in (and making things happen) is much more satisfying then just getting a paycheck and waiting to get fired (or die).” Seth Godin, Tribes
At Xtreme Labs I learned first hand the incredible things a young company could accomplish when they rally behind a common vision — in that case the power of mobile. At Pivotal Labs, I was fortunate enough to earn my Black Belt in a unique blend of the Extreme Programming software development process which is key to shipping actual minimum viable products to test and validate products in market. Now, I’m absolutely amped to take both those learnings and start applying them to the ecosystem that arises when you work at the intersection of devices and software, colloquially, the Internet of Things. I have a love/hate relationship with the buzz around IoT; we hear it thrown around everyday, but unfortunately most of us have little practical experience with what it means or what it even is. In its simplest (and best IMO) form, the Internet of Things enables seamless interactivity between our digital and physical worlds without our interjections. Unfortunately, today IoT most often means a handful a disparate pieces of hardware connected to a handful of disparate pieces of software, and ironically enough a more complicated environment.
So, in comes TribalScale. Do we know exactly how we’re going to make this experience an awesome one? No, not a chance. But we’re united by our passion to change things and we’ve got the chops and discipline to leverage our process. Pivotal Labs cemented in me the value of applying Eric Ries’ approach to any product: validate assumptions, talk to real users, build lean, and ship often. At TribalScale we’re going to take a Lean Startup approach to IoT and I’m excited for the ride ahead and looking forward to kicking ass — that’s why I joined.
Connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn and let’s keep the conversation going — exciting times ahead!
