After several months in the job market and with 4 good offers on the table, I took a job as a PM at YouTube at the end of Feb.

It's completely different from what I expected. Given the size of Google/YouTube, I was expecting the work to be narrow and—relative to my founder experience—boring. Yet, I expected the training and this-is-how-we-build-products to be world class. Neither is true. My scope and area of ownership is large which I love. However, I've been surprised to experience how immature the org is. At the time I joined, my team lacked many processes and standards that even the product org at my startups had. (I've since come to understand why, which is a mix of the product area I'm working in being new and growing like a weed, and a deliberate decentralized culture at Google.)

Overall I'm enjoying it and it is a great place for me right now. I get to go deep into my craft of building products, get paid very well relatively to startup life, and experience new things amidst a great group of people. I do still want to get back to startups, but I'm comfortable with that being on a 3 to 5 year timeline. (Although this week I've really had the startup itch and noticed the first feeling of desire to get back out there.)

At the end of September, I decided to leave Colony, the company I co-founded, after 4.5 years. I probably have an entire post explaining why and how I came to that conclusion, but suffice it to say it was the right time for me to move forward.

My main focus now is coding. For about 2-years, I’ve been learning to code part time. I’ve completed a Udacity nanodegree →, built a chrome extension, and have done some other online courses and small side projects. Yet I have never felt like I had the depth that I wanted. Faced with an idea and a blank editor I struggled to really make much progress.

That’s when I heard about Launch School →. Their mastery-based pedagogy really spoke to me and, at the end of 2019, I decided to enroll. I’ve been working through that part-time, but now that I’m no longer at Colony, this is the main thing I’m focusing on. I’m still early on in their curriculum, but my comprehension is really strong and I’m feeling much more capable.

I’m also in the job market for the first time in my adult life. My ideal role is as a director of product at a series B startup. My experience interviewing so far has been mixed. As someone who has only ever been a founder, I’m a fairly atypical candidate.

I have a breadth of hands-on experience across ops and product, and depth as an owner / leader who’s spent 10+ years growing people, teams, and companies. I’m a strong product-first generalist who’s comfortable asking questions, finding the right problems, and figuring things out in ambiguous environments. Yet I’m not as niched or vertically deep as many candidates applying to specific roles. I’ve seen this be both a pro and a con.

One company that's valued my unique experience is Google. I passed through their hiring process and was approved by their hiring committee earlier this year. I’m currently in the team match / offer stage with them.

I don’t know where I’ll end up next, or when it’ll happen, but I do feel excited to enter this next stage of my career.