A very special TBT

In August 2008 (I am pretty sure it was a Thursday), my good friend 🚚 Mike Hillyer reached out and told me about this small startup he had joined that was going to change the way people communicate, but he needed help explaining and deploying it for customers.  He introduced me to founder George Schlossnagle, who quickly became another good friend.  George had a vision of a robust messaging platform that would enable a service to reach millions of customers in mere minutes anywhere and provide deep data and reliability.  I got it immediately, bought into the vision, and never looked back.

The 14-year road to this point has been an absolute blast. There have been so many unforgettable events with icons of the #email industry. It will be a long time before people forget the San Diego conferences or the lasting bonds we forged there. I am thankful to have been associated with absolutely brilliant creators like Wez Furlong, John Peacock, and so many others who built messaging magic way ahead of the industry curve. Together we not only built an awesome place to work, but we also helped make the email industry better and improve the lives of so many people.  Aside from the direct product work, the amazing minds here contributed to security, anti-abuse, and community projects you may never be aware of, but your personal inbox is a safer place today because of the work this team contributed to.  

A self-proclaimed “lifer”,  I never expected to leave this company I helped to build, but this week it happened as part of this event. Sad as I am now, I take a great deal of solace in knowing I have been blessed to work with amazing leaders and incredible humans who worked to build much more than a company and a product.  We built a very special community of people who really did change the world for the better.  I will miss working with the likes of Scott Habicht, April Mullen, Kieran Cooper, Katie Rose, Harold Vass, Casey Martin, Hal Muchnick, … way too many incredible people to list here – many of whom are on this list.

There are so many people to thank for their impact on me during my time with MessageSystems / Sparkpost / Messagebird that it would fill a book, so I will save you the list and know that they know who they are. I would be remiss, though, if I did not specifically mention Steve Tuck and  Darren Smith for helping me build the latest version of the Solutions Team, which continuously pushed the envelope, improved customer deployments, and raised the bar every single day.  

As Walt would say… Forward.