It’s an honor to be posting here for the first time in my new role as outside.in’s CTO, thank you Mark for the intro. I’ll post on a fairly regular basis with news from the technology front. We have some groundbreaking projects in the pipeline for 2009 and it’s going to be a lot of hard work and fun to bring our founders’ vision of hyperlocal information to the forefront of the “where” Web.
I wrote a few words about why I joined outside.in on my personal blog. I’m going to talk here about my first couple of weeks and what’s in store.
After my first day I joked with the team that I’d probably come back for day 2. Well, I’ve been in positions where that wasn’t a given! It’s sometimes the case that a CTO is brought in too early, or too late, or for the wrong reasons. At OI, I’m coming aboard at a crucial time in the development of the business and technology platform, but with an incredibly solid foundation to build upon. Over the past 2 years, co-founder and VP of Engineering Cory Forsyth assembled an outstanding team and created a set of hyperlocal applications that are at the forefront of our industry. The next stage for this technology is accomplishing scale to be ready for the usage we will see this year and beyond. In parallel, we’ll deliver innovation in geolocation of content and presentation of that content.
I’ve spent my initial 2 weeks learning as much as I can absorb about the application stack and team, and perhaps most importantly helping hone our company-wide goals for this year and beyond. There’s a lot to learn! I’ve been nearly perpetually exhausted but brimming with ideas. Caffeine from the new office espresso machine helps smooth it all out! Scaling the existing services while continuing outside.in’s history of rolling out lots of value with lots of agility is my primary goal. I have a lot of ideas about how best to accomplish this, but in this initial phase I have been doing more learning than leading, and that’s very clearly been the right thing to do. I’m looking at all aspects of the way we engineer, run, and improve our products through my lens of experience, and ensuring that the operational and process facets of our company are as efficient as they can be, and that we are ready to handle traffic and exceed expectations. My pledge is we’ll do both, and it’ll be evident shortly.
Heading into week 3, we’ll begin to turn our technology scaling goals into concrete plans, layering in the business milestones and some exciting advances in hyperlocal content management and automation. I’ll post details about these in the near future. Until then, I’ll sign off with a thanks to all of our users for sharing our hyperlocal vision and helping bring about the future of news. And thanks of course to Mark, our founders and our board for placing their confidence in me; I’m engaged and excited to lead the team that’s going to deliver the goods.
