Leaving Citrix, time for a break.

The past four years have been an amazing rollercoaster ride. I’ve grown, and experienced so many things as a part of the amazing journey of taking little unknown Hoist from Vesterbro, into the heart of one of the biggest IT companies in Silicon Valley.

Joining Hoist

It took about 6 months of heavy beer drinking with Jon, Pollas and Kasper before I finally caved in and joined the team. I joined when Tommy also came onboard, and together with his leadership, he also had a bag of money with him. Money that enabled us to hire a core team, and take the company to the next level.

I came directly from a kick-ass front-end team at Vodafone, where I was surrounded by massive talent, but I was also quite spoiled by working relatively short hours and thereby not really changing the world. This meant that when I joined the team I still lived in the “#bigco bubble”. It took some time to realize what I had committed to, and what it meant to be "back" in a startup.

Building Podio

Building Podio has been an adventure. In the beginning everything was a bit chaotic; we had a prototype that didn’t match our ambitions, a growing team and many egos that needed to respect each other and learn how to work together, but somehow we found a way to make it work, as in really fucking work.

There's so many war stories and learnings from Podio to be shared, which I hope I'll get to share in some future posts, so stay tuned, they will be worth a read.

Joining the Citrix-family

Everything in Podio has happened so fast, and joining Citrix happened fast too. I still remember the surreal day when the acquisition was all over the news. It was a crazy time.

Becoming a part of the Citrix family, hasn’t always been an easy journey, but compared to the time when I joined Vodafone from ZYB, then Citrix really “gets it”. It’s a great company, but as with any bigger organisation overhead slowly starts to creep it, things starts to move slower, and people get (too) comfortable...

Becoming an intrepreneur within Citrix

About a year ago, in October 2013, I was asked if I was interested in joining the Citrix’s Research team in San Francisco to be a part of a WebRTC-related project.

So the past year I’ve traveled quite a lot, and been acting as a an “intrepreneur” knocking down walls inside Citrix in order to operate the team as a little startup. It has been loads of fun. Getting the opportunity to disrupt a big organization from the inside is a lot of responsibility, but also quite a challenge. A challenge I was up for.

One year later the product is now known as GoToMeeting Free. I’ve build it from scratch, and set an amazing team around it. It’s what I see as the next-generation of GoToMeeting powered by WebRTC. We have already seen some incredible growth, which gives me hope, as I believe GoToMeeting Free is built on the right principles and can potentially kill products like Hangouts and Skype, because it's a so much better experience.

GoToMeeting Free is a real thing now, and has entered it’s next phase. This also means that my “mission” to disrupt is complete, and that's a good thing.

Moving on

When looking back joining Hoist has been one of the best decisions I've made in my life. It’s simple as that. I meet brilliant people, built great things, been challenged, and more importantly I’ve learned a awful lot, and I’ve grown faster than I ever dreamed.

But it’s time. It’s time for me to move on.

At certain points in your life, you have to take a leap of faith, and I’ve just done that. This means that for the first time in my career, I don’t have a plan, I don’t know what’s next.

All I do know is that

I want to get closer to the web platform.
I want to spend more time on my projects like RemoteDebug.
I want to take ColdFront Conference to the next level.
I want to spent more time down in Prototype.
I want to challenge things.

So I’m taking a break. I don’t know for how long, or what's next.

I might end-up in startup-land; I might freelance; or do something completely else.

I'm open to new adventures and I'm sure everything will be okay in the end.