Patrick Lightbody's personal blog
Bam! Third Wheel!
For anyone that ever reads (or read) Maddox (aka: thebestpageintheuniverse.net), you might appreciate what I found yesterday while in Seattle:
Yup, apparently someone actually took Maddox’s idea for rendering the Segway Human Transport obsolete seriously and sold it to the Seattle police department.
Yesterday I was re-waitlisted for the Fall 2008 incoming Berkeley Haas full time MBA program. Considering the other two outcomes are rejected and accepted, it could have been worse but it could have been better. Being the 5th time I’ve received communication from Haas that I’m still on the waitlist, I guess I should take this as a good sign, considering that they have let most other people off the list by now.
However, school starts in August and I find it increasingly unlikely that I’ll be getting in. Fortunately, I have other plans. One of the many options I’ll be considering is re-applying to Stanford and Haas.
I’m also considering applying to my undergrad alma mater: UCSD’s Rady School of Business, which is a new MBA program launched only a couple years ago. And as I look towards programs like the Peace Corps, the MBA programs offered while on a Peace Corps mission seem interesting, though they are primarily from lower-ranked schools.
Now that I’m leaving my job and looking at my next steps, I’ve been spending some time researching various volunteer organizations that would take me out to third-world/impoverished nations to do volunteer work. So far the two most promising are Doctors Without Borders and Peace Corps.
The problem is that neither offers exactly what I’m looking for:I’m leaving Gomez, my current employer, as of next Friday, July 25th. It’s been a great ride. Over the last ~2 years, with Gomez, and an additional year as the founder of Autoriginate/HostedQA, I’ve had a tremendous opportunity to work on really amazing products in the QA/testing/SaaS space.
But it’s also been tough, especially the frequent flights between Portland, OR and Boston, MA, and I’m looking to either pursue an MBA graduate program and/or move back to the San Francisco bay area, where I’m originally from. I’m on the waitlist at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business full-time MBA program, and if that doesn’t pane out I’ll be re-applying to several bay area schools next year while also looking for new opportunities in the bay.
I don’t have anything specific lined up. My plan right now is to spend the rest of the year carefully weighing my next steps. I’m looking at a lot of different options: grad school, another startup, joining a bay area company (ideally a startup focussing on consumer/social media), or possibly even doing something “out there” like joining the PeaceCorps or some other field work in an impoverished country. In the more immediate term, I’d likely be working on mioNews in between planning my next steps.
With that in mind, I’m open to hearing from my friends and readers about what I should do next. Find a job in Portland, OR or the bay area? Perhaps someone has participated in the PeaceCorps and has advise? Or perhaps someone is out there looking for help in software development and/or product management leadership at their startup? Let me know – the idea of so many options excites me!