Joining Calm.

Today is a particularly exciting day because I can finally stop telling folks that I’m joining a new role, and instead say that I’ve started a new role, and in particular that I’ve joined Calm to serve as their CTO. I’ve written a few words here, will update my Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, and then it’s time to get to work on my first ninety days.

Deciding to embark on a new endeavor is never easy, so I wouldn’t say that deciding to join Calm was easy! It took a good deal of reflection on both Calm and my priorities. However, I can say that the decision became easy as I came to understand the mission and spent time with Michael and Alex, the leadership team, and especially folks on the engineering team. I learned a lot through the process, and foremost I learned that this was the company and team I wanted to be part of, learn from, and grow with.

I also enjoy a good coincidence, and had fun reading Kaya Thomas’ The path to management published alongside my own Do engineering managers need to be technical? in Increment’s Teams issue, and then a day later getting to chat with Kaya directly about her work at Calm.

I’ve previously alluded to this role change a few times, starting with my 2019 in Review post where I wrote a bit about what I appreciated the most about my genuinely transformational time at Stripe. Stripe is a company of writers and consequently there is a rich history of post-Stripe exposition such as Mark McGranaghan’s post and Brianna Wolfson’s tweet storm. It’s not necessarily impossible that I’ll extend the remarks in 2019 in Review at some point with more learnings from Stripe, but I think it takes years for personal experiences to mull into a good story, so don’t stay up late waiting. (And I already wrote much of what I learned as it happened.)

If history is an accurate predictor of the future, then starting a new role and the rapid learning that it brings will lead me to write more rather than less this year, but less over the next few months (and I have a goal to write a bit less this year than last year, so there are some confounding factors in play here). For the time being, I have some pieces written and scheduled to publish the first Tuesday of each month through August, so hopefully you, dear reader, won’t get too bored in the meantime.

That said, if you do get bored, Calm is indeed hiring.