I’ve spent the last 16 years of my life at SpiderOak. I started in 2010 as a mobile developer making frankly shit pay, and one month after hiring I had deployed the first SpiderOak mobile app. It wasn’t that good, but it shipped.

Since then has been a wild ride. We went from a scrappy company endorsed by Ed Snowden with “GoAwayNSA” as our Kansas City HQ WiFi name to a company serving Space Force and building next-gen tech for cybersecurity from low Earth orbit all the way to the moon.

Tomorrow, I start a new job at a new company. It’ll be my first properly “new” job since 2010. It’s a good band-aid to rip-off as well; I’ve made being at SpiderOak part of who I am. For my < 1% in options and the forever Startup Stress™, staying just wasn’t good for me. It’s been a strange time for me processing this. I dive into things with passion, and I like that about myself, but this Monday is the first time I’ll have a job that’s just a job. I’ll bust my ass and do good work- like I said, I dive into things with passion- but it’s not going to be part of what I see when I look in the mirror, and I’m really digging it.

I’m leaving SpiderOak on (what I hope are) good terms- I’m sticking around to help them out, I still have a company laptop and email, etc., and I think there’s a bright future ahead for them that they can catch. I just need to be on a different train at this point of my life.