A pivotal day

Posted 23 November 2006

Today was my last day at Adobe. It was an odd feeling walking out the door for the last time.

I had a great job at Adobe. There were a lot of exceptional people I had the pleasure of working with. I’ll miss working with many of them, but I’m sure the relationships will endure. I’ll miss being in the digital photography industry, though I think I’ll enjoy it even more as a hobby.

I won’t miss the shrink-wrapped software business model, the isolation from strategic decision making, the split between marketing and development silos, the financial tyranny of being in a public company, and, most of all, the too-small box I felt I was in.

Seven years ago (on Thanksgiving day, in fact) I had the idea for a photo appliance, and registered the PhotoTablet domain. A couple months later we raised a round of financing and started a company, which evolved to be a PC software company and was renamed Fotiva. Two years later we sold the company to Adobe, where I’ve been for five years.

I’m starting on my fourth career. First I was a hardware/firmware engineer; then a newsletter publisher and conference producer; then a manager of software development and research. Now it’s on to building a business based on web applications. I think it’s a bigger opportunity than anything I’ve done in the past.