Chinese New Year falls on February 8th on the western calendar this year. This is very apropos for me personally since I will no longer be a Platform9 employee as of that date and will be making a new start. It’s also bittersweet since I am leaving on my own accord but doing so after a short and productive time there in Technical Marketing. Before I talk about why I am leaving and what I will be up to next, let me get two questions out of the way:

• Whose decision was it to leave? I made the call to resign after giving it a great deal of  thought and talking with several friends. I am leaving on very good terms and have even talked about staying involved with platform9 in some advisory role.
• Do you still believe in the viability of Platform9? The answer to that is most definitely YES! Momentum for the Platform9 solution is growing and they are poised this year for great things. I talk with Engineering regularly and the capabilities that will be released in 2016 will set up Platform9 to be a prime leader in the Infrastructure Management as a Service space. I would not hesitate to recommend Platform9 to potential customers or prospective new employees.

So why leave now? As I asked myself that question, I thought about the reasons I wanted to join a startup like Platform9 in the first place:

• The opportunity to get back to doing what I am most passionate about from a career standpoint – Technical Evangelism and Technical Marketing.
• The opportunity to work at an early stage startup for the first time (I had been in some latter stage ones in the past) and to be involved in explaining and evangelizing new technologies.

I talked more in depth about why I joined Platform9 in a previous blog post.

As I reflected on these reasons and my experience the past 8 months, I realized I have learned a few thing about myself:

• I am affirmed in my passion for and ability to evangelize new and useful technologies. The things I’ve most enjoyed doing at Platform9 has been producing technical content, sharing about our solution on webinars, and talking technology with the tech community at very various conferences and meetups.
• I also learned that my temperament and skill set is probably best suited for an organization that has a culture of working with remote employees.

These are important lessons and ones that I would not have learned if I didn’t try different things like being a BDM at EMC or working as the only remote employee and a Technical Marketing Engineer at an early stage startup. And they are lessons that inform me as I try to focus on things that I am passionate about, which I’ve blogged about before as well.

So, what’s next? In the short term, the answer is “I don’t know.” For various reasons, including not wanting Platform9 to go into their new fiscal year assuming that I would be with the company, I am borrowing a page from Keith Townsend and resigning without my next job lined up. So assuming I don’t receive and accept an offer between now and February 8th, what will I be doing with my time after the start of the Chinese New Year?

• Spend more time with my family including picking up my daughter every day from school while I am unemployed.
• Play with cool new technologies and getting better with technologies that I know.
• Try and watch all 208 episodes (including the new ones coming out) of The X-Files and both movies as well.

Hopefully, I will also be interviewing for my next adventure and Lord willing, there won’t be too long a gap between my last day at Platform9 and my starting a new job. To accomplish that, I am hoping the open source, vendor, and user communities of which I am a member can help. So if anyone knows an established company that is looking for a Technical Evangelist/Marketing Engineer focused on Cloud Computing and Cloud Native technologies, please reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.  Thank you all for your support and I hope that I will get to work with some of you in the near future.