I am leaving Threadless after 4 awesome years.

It was super hard to leave a job that taught me so much, helped me grow and was staffed by all of my friends, but I needed to make that leap towards the future. (Here is a nice interview covering all sorts of aspects of my leaving.)

I did it, and the future is looking bright.

In the next few months, I am going to be helping Rackspace in their cloud computing division. My official title is Nepholologist; a person who studies clouds. I will also be working hard to launch a startup (secrets secrets).  This is extremely exciting.  I’ll be spending half my day working with amazing technologists at Rackspace and the other half pursuing my own thing.   Rackspace has been amazing.  They’ve accommodated my want for freedom and the ability to concentrate on my own stuff while helping them out.  It will definitely be the best part-time job I’ve ever had.

I plan on detoxing.  I’ll be cleansing my brain of all the assumptions that I formed while at Threadless and ready myself for the startup life.  I want to be more scrappy and lean in my thinking.  Part of the plan is to complete all the various projects that I’ve worked on throughout the years like citypayments.org, excla.im, exclaim tracking, and harpersfriends.  I’ve done a lot of fun hacks in the last few years, and I want to work on making them much more robust.  This will allow me closure on one chapter of my life – while some doors close, new ones are opening.

Thanks to everyone who was supportive of me in this time. I could never have made this decision without the support of my family and friends.  To my lovely wife Hiromi, who was constantly telling me to pull the trigger.  My friends and coworkers who knew something was up – but dealt with me until the end – even when I was flighty.  My parents who helped me think rationally.  Most importantly, the entire Threadless family.  Without Threadless and the knowledge I’ve gained from my experiences there, I would not have the opportunities I have today.  The last four years have been utterly amazing (and awesome).

I have a couple of posts lined up for later this week.  One about my history at Threadless and another about the hijinks that have existed over the last few years.

Stay tuned.  It’s only just beginning.