My official last day with ReadyTalk was this past Thursday, March 27th, 2014. I’ll be beginning a new adventure with Ibotta starting tomorrow, March 31st!

ReadyTalk

This was the first time I was posed with the option to leave a company that wasn’t specifically time-boxed by other external forces. It wasn’t a high-school job, a summer internship, a senior project, so there wasn’t a defined timeline of when it was time to head to the next experience.

Making the decision to move to a new company was a really difficult decision. I’ve made a ton of great friends at ReadyTalk and learned how to put together all the pieces I learned during my time at CU Boulder.

ReadyTalk really is a great place to work. The people are some of the smartest, most caring people I’ve worked with so far in my career. They know how to have fun, and how to get high-quality products out the door. Not to mention, the C-level staff is approachable and truly cares about creating a sustainable business with happy, healthy employees. Every company can say they care about employees; ReadyTalk proves that they care about their employees every day.

ReadyTalk was a great experience for me, and I’m proud of everything I’ve accomplished during my time there. But, it was time to move on.

Ibotta

I was contacted out-of-the-blue by Conor Swanson of LoHi Labs. Conor was doing some moonlight-recruiting for his brother, Luke, CTO at Ibotta. Luke was looking to bring a new software engineer on at Ibotta, and Conor thought I might be a good fit.

I wasn’t actively looking to leave ReadyTalk, but I had used Ibotta before and was surprised to find out they are located right down the street from the ReadyTalk office. I agreed to have coffee with Luke and discuss what was going on at Ibotta. After just a few minutes sitting down with Luke, it was pretty apparent that there was a ton of interesting problems to solve, and that they needed some more hands to help continue pushing the product along.

One of the biggest factors in my decision to join Ibotta was the size and experience of the engineering organization. Code for the entire Ibotta product was developed by five people. That makes me number six. In addition to the small size, all of the other engineers have a ton of experience. I’m definitely going to be in the deep-end when I first start, but I’ll be able to learn a ton from these guys. I’m really excited to get started.

Looking Forward

I’ve got a lot to get up to speed on when I start tomorrow. Specifically, I’ve been reading a lot into Ruby on Rails, EmberJS and D3. Keep an eye out for new blog posts as I learn a bunch of new stuff!