- Posted in: General
Today was my last day at Elastic. After 4.5 years with the company and almost 9 years with the Swiftype (and later Enterprise Search) team, I have decided to move on and see what else is out there. I wanted to use this post to clarify the reasoning behind the decision because a lot of people have been reaching out over the past month wondering about the details.
For most of my career (for at least 15-17 years before joining Elastic) I have worked in small to medium-sized startups, always in SaaS, moving really fast and having my impact on the business be mostly tied to my ability to ship. I loved that, even though it was often painful and stressful. My brain ended up being trained to derive dopamine from the constant feeling of shipping, constant feeling of overcoming challenges and solving problems.
Then, we got acquired by Elastic – a truly amazing company, honestly, the best company I have ever worked for and, unfortunately, a company that ships packaged software with its inherent effects on development process. At first, while my projects revolved around security and compliance, then around internal code migrations, integration into the Elastic ecosystem, etc, I felt really happy – I would do the really challenging work and derive pleasure from overcoming those challenges.
Unfortunately, over time the initial rush of excitement faded away and I have realized, that the most challenging problems within our product have been solved and I ended up in a position of working on a packaged product, building features with a release cycle of 6-8 weeks. The product is amazing, the features are really exciting, but the very long feedback cycle simply did not work for me after so many years in SaaS.
I still believe in Elastic, I love the company, the team and the amazing culture we have built over the years. But I need to ship faster, move faster, get feedback from my users sooner. After considering different options, I have decided to join Shopify – a large and fast moving Rails-based company, where I hope to get a chance to once again experience the thrill of fast delivery and tight feedback loops. Let’s see how it goes 🙂