I recently wrapped up 4 years at a Big Company. During that time, I switched teams once, I transitioned from an Individual Contributor (IC) to an Engineering Manager (EM), the company name changed from Square to Block, and the number of employees increased from something like 5,000 to 15,000. Those numbers may seem small potatoes compared to many other Big Companies. For me, having only worked (full-time) at $\le$ Series C startups prior to joining Square, this was a 1 or 2 order of magnitude...| www.ethanrosenthal.com
A very silly blog post came out a couple months ago about The Unbundling of Airflow. I didn’t fully read the article, but I saw its title and skimmed it enough to think that it might’ve been too thin of an argument to hold water but just thick enough to clickbait the VC world with the word “unbundling” while simultaneously Cunningham’s Law-ing the data world. There was certainly a Twitter discourse.| www.ethanrosenthal.com
There is no shortage of stories about tech founders achieving face-melting wealth from startup success. Bless their hearts. On the other side are stories with unhappy endings of founders sacrificing everything for the sake of their startup. I hate those stories. This story lies smack-dab in the middle. There is zero money made and minimal money lost. This is a story of how I had an idea that I was excited about, pursued it for 6 months, and then decided to pull the plug and get a job.| www.ethanrosenthal.com