On moving on to new adventures
This article was originally posted on Medium, but has been re-posted here for historical reasons.
Earlier this spring I made the tough decision to leave the product and the wonderful team behind it at appear.in. After nearly four years in my current position at appear.in, and close to 6 years in total in Telenor Digital (parent company), it was time for me to move on.
Telenor Digital was in many ways my first real experience working as a Software Engineer. It was where my first summer internship took me, back then as a hired consultant, until I moved on to become a part-time intern during my university years. It was where I landed my first full time job, with the team I am now leaving. The wonderful people that has worked, or still work there to this day, have been instrumental in my professional development from Junior Software Engineer to Tech Lead for appear.in, and I am forever grateful to all those who answered my stupid questions and stuck by me as I struggled to find my way around things.
The appear.in team as it were back in November 2013, a few months into the very beginning.
Over the years, I have been challenged to do a lot of things you wouldn’t expect as a Software Engineer. Things that has helped me grow beyond being just a code monkey to working directly on product, analytics, marketing, business and many, many other things. Through appear.in I have spoken at conferences in Norway, Great Britain, The Unites States, and Japan, made a video for Google Developers on WebRTC, pitched the product at SXSW, given out free hot dogs to teens outside high schools, and had business meetings all over the world with a bunch of fantastic people and teams.
And while it is with a heavy heart that I have decided to move on, I also believe that now may be the best possible time for me to do so. The team has since its beginning grown from being a small group of rebels into a fully fledged team with some of the best people available. I have no doubt that the team will go on to do many great things, but that for me, this is the end of my journey.
And the team as it eventually was a couple of months before I left
Now what?
Over the years, I have come to realize that there are a couple of things I do really well. I’m good at building organization and culture, I understand people and their needs, and I have a keen interest in understanding and solving problems. In addition, I build things fast when I have to, and can make tough choices on engineering for scale vs. engineering for experimentation.
Therefore, I am doing something crazy. I am starting my own company together with Svein Willassen and Ida Aalen , called Confrere. We are still very early stages, but we a clear in our mission to build communication services that improve the way people interact. Video communication may have become a commodity, but there are many aspects to human communication that can be improved still with specialized communication tools and experiences that currently do not exist.
With this my hope is to learn even more, experience the pain of building a company from scratch, and come out of it stronger and more knowledgeable than ever before. And of course make a little money along the way.
Here’s to new beginnings!
Interested in knowing more? Go to confrere.com to read more about what we’re going to do.
Haaaadeeeebraaaaa
