Introducing ‘The Day Series’

In December 2007, I left a cushy job at EMC as a Senior Software Engineer to start my first company, MessageSling.

I left to start the company w/ Scot Junkin, a friend and fellow geek from WPI.  We started without funding.  We started without experience.  We started without even a clear idea of what we wanted to do.  But we started because we needed to.

Eleven months later, we were out of money and I was broke; I was consulting to try and pay the mortgage on the house I just built; and was certain I had done irreparable damage to my relationship with Scot.

In February of 2009, I started working full time for Punchbowl Software. MessageSling stayed running.

In December of 2009, the combination of 10 months of neglect with an Amazon EC2 instance failure caused the service to suffer a catastrophic failure.  And in January of 2010, two years after starting MessageSling, we put up this page.

I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what happened.  The highs, the lows, the fights, the wins, the lessons, the consequences.  And now I want to open the kimono. [1]

So today, I’m introducing “The Day Series”, a blog that will outline in excruciating detail everything.  Everything that happened in the days leading up to starting MessageSling, running the company, raising funding, running out of funding, getting a full time job, shutting it down, everything around and in between.

It will also detail how I still became Scot’s Best Man.

Me (on the left) & Scot

This will not be a chronological catalog of events.  It will be a random semi-stream-of-consciousness dumping of what I recall.  Each post will outline key days as I remember them.

Scot is on board with this blog, and will be at the very least proofreading all the posts. I expect him to make a few guest posts from time to time.

I want feedback.  I want criticism.  I want discussion.  If you have a question or a suggestion for a post, let me know either in the comments, via @angilly, or ryan@angilly.com.

So with no further ado, I give you The Day I (tried to) leave EMC.

References
[1] A friend of mine who I respect a lot didn’t know what this phrase meant.  But I didn’t want to take it out, so you get a definition :)

Thanks
Thanks to Tim Downing and Kate Angilly for providing feedback on drafts of this post.