Blogbody

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!

This is somewhat old news, but I never shared it so I figured now is as good a time as any, considering that I may know the decision in the next 24-48 hours. In January I applied to the Stanford and Berkeley MBA programs. While I got interviews at both, I ultimately was denied admission from Stanford and waitlisted at Berkeley.

After living in Portland, OR for almost four years, I’m excited to come back to the bay area for either school or possibly a new opportunity (I’ve got a couple in mind)… or both! I’m moving forward with life assuming that Berkeley will not work out this year, but there is a chance that either way I’ll be back home this fall. As much as I love Portland, I need to come back to the tech world for a few years - no place else is like it for a tech guy like me.

Anyway - tomorrow Berkeley notifies the people on the waitlist of what their status is. They’ve cut it down quiet a bit over the last few weeks, so the good news is that I’m still on it. The bad news is, of course, that I haven’t been accepted yet Keep your fingers crossed!