April 27, 2005
Chip's A Yahoo!
One of the odder side effects of working closely with somebody else for nearly 20 years, which you only discover by not working with them for a while, is that a small but important fraction of what you know ends up being actually stored in the other person’s brain. I encountered this strange phenomenon in early 2003, after our most recent startup, State Software, ignominiously cratered in the face of our principal investor’s feckless amateurism as a venture capitalist. Suddenly faced with the need to get real jobs to put food on the table, our heroes were forced to take separate paths. Randy (after some exciting adventures that, as Michael Flanders says, we’ll tell you all about some other time) landed at Yahoo!, and I wound up in my present job at Avistar. It was after settling into the new job that I experienced the curious and disconcerting sensation of not being able to access some of the stuff I knew I knew, as it was in a different head 15 miles or so to the south. (I’ll let Randy speak for himself as to whether he experienced any analog to this weirdness.)
Thus it is that I am thrilled to announce that after next week I shall put down my hammer, tweezers, astrolabe, and other code refactoring tools at Avistar and become instead a fellow Yahoo! alongside my long-time collaborator.
Now nobody will be safe.