A Farewell Note to Lithium

Last week marks the end of a chapter in my life. As I sent out an earlier version of the following note, I was quickly reminded that I forgot about the patents we filed and granted, and the community health index, and a slew of product and features we built and shipped, etc.

I told my friends at Lithium, "If I can't even remember everything that I did here, it probably means that I've been here too long." I don't think I can capture everything I did at Lithium in a short farewell note, but I can at least add a few milestones that I've missed, and provide a few thoughts to give you a bit more context.

=== BEGIN ===

Dear Friends,

It’s been about 9.5 years since my day 1 at Lithium, which was July 1st, 2007 if I remember correctly. It’s so long ago that my memory starts to get a little fuzzy, so some of the numbers I am going to tell you here might just be a tiny bit off.

During my time at Lithium, my title has changed from Engineer, Engineer II (Analytics Engineer), Analytics Scientist, Principal Scientist, and then Chief Scientist. My role has also evolved from a strictly engineering and product focus role to a more externally focused thought leadership role that collaborated across Marketing, Strategic Consulting, Services, Customer Success, Sales, and even Legal.

Throughout my Lithium career, I had 169 SVN commits of apparently ~half million lines of codes (LOC) to our code base (those were the days before we migrated to Git). Note: the LOC is probably highly inflated due to some compiled binaries I’ve checked-in. Don't worry if you don't know what this means, but if you are an experienced software engineer, you'll know it's pretty much impossible to contribute half million LOC in 169 commits.

I've worked on countless (I simply lost count) features on our community platform, including, but not limited to, analytics/algorithms (e.g. the community health index, aka CHI), several front-end reporting dashboards, gamification features, as well as the back-end architectures. Some of these were genuinely groundbreaking and culminated in 4 patents filed (1 granted, 1 allowed, and 2 pending).

I’ve also written 883 posts (with 1505 kudos) in our own community, spoken at least at 76 external public venues (conference, universities, gov. and corp. events, including our very own LiNC), appeared in at least 88 media or PR outlets through journalist interviews or byline contributions (including TechCrunch, The Economist, Huffington Post, etc.), published 2 books + 1 peer-reviewed journal paper.

Needless to say, Lithium grew and changed as well. We grew from about 60 employees in our Emeryville office to about 500 with offices around the globe, 4 development center in SF, Austin, Bangalore, and Portland. I’ve been under the leadership of 3 CEOs, worked directly under 8 managers, seen through 4 rounds of VC fundraising (I missed 1 that happened just before I join), acquisitions of 5 companies, and also our own acquisition by Vista. And so, it is also time for me to move on.

I must thank Lithium for providing the stage for me to shine, and for giving me the opportunities and helping me achieve the abovementioned accolades. I also want to thank all the Lithium customers for being so encouraging and supportive of my work. Without the support of my collaborators (both inside and outside Lithium), I wouldn't be here today. It is truly an honor and a privilege to have worked with so many talented individuals here. We really had a great run at Lithium, and it’s time for me to pass on the baton.

I am confident that Lithium will be successful and profitable under Vista’s methodical approach to running a software business. I was at our new CEO's Company All Hands meeting Feb 6th. I had to say that I really admire his humble, respectful nature, and his candidness. I also felt his conviction for customer retention and customer success. So I have no doubt that he will take Lithium to the next phase of success (and cross the chasm, as Geoffrey Moore puts it).

In the meantime, don’t be a stranger. Please stay in touch with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, or contact me via my personal email. I will be in the SF office until EOD Friday, Feb 9th.

Thank you and I wish you all the best.

=== END ===

Yes, after a ~decade, last Friday (Feb 9th, 2018) was my last day at Lithium. It's a day that I will always remember. Although there are some unfinished work and deliverables that simply cannot fulfill (if you know me, you know I hate that), Lithium has been extremely accommodating and made arrangements that allow me to execute some of my final acts that I'd hate to cancel. My data science and engineering friends also gave me a surprise farewell with beer and lots of Lithium love (cupcakes). That was so sweet of them.

As one chapter comes to an end, another will begin... soon. In the meantime, I will take some time off to really think about what I really want to do next. Stay tuned...