layout: post title: Roller Coaster created: 1272914624 categories:

• Personal tags:
• Bootup Labs
• Bryght
• 100 Mile Client Roster

As you may have seen on the Bootup Labs blog, I'm "getting off the roller coaster" - I'm leaving my "day job" activities at Bootup and am moving on.

As Danny said, we've been pushing on this seed accelerator piece of string for 2 years now. I jumped into it right after parking Bryght with Raincity Studios and helping with the transition there, from one unfunded startup to another.

Of course, Bryght is the main reason that I felt that I had to create something like Bootup. While I'm still very proud of what the team and I accomplished with Bryght (I only have to look at the 3000 person Drupalcon in San Francisco or the Aegir mass deployment tool for Drupal to see some of that legacy), we could have done so much more within the right environment.

The design for Bootup is to fix the main two things that were (and still are) missing from the ecosystem in Vancouver / Canada: mentorship and funding. I still believe in this mission 100%. My moving on has everything to do with needing to earn more money for myself, today. 

Now, I've been helping to build the local community for 6 years, and have been working on a "ramen" level salary at two startups in a row. I've burned through a lot of energy and pocket money.

What this means in the short term is that I am reaching out to people to see what (paying!) opportunities are available while continuing to work with the 2009 and 2010 Bootup cohorts, as well as other startups that I advise. I'll be in the Bootup office every Wednesday.

As far as community goes, I'm stepping back from organizing or taking an active role. Maura and Sonia have created a great "backbone" with the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, and there are people that are stepping up to organize and run events like Mentor Speed Dating. There are a couple of projects that I think are important, but I will take them on a case by case basis rather than a general energy burn in keeping things moving.

What, exactly, will I be doing?

In all likelihood, I will end up going back to my roots in technical architecture and web strategy. There are interesting things afoot with mobile, open data, and even the semantic web is starting to pop up again.

I'm also going to ramp up my speaking & training. I've got a trip to PEI that I'm still working the details out around, and a recent trip to Galiano Island has given me an itch about exploring Emma Jane Hogbin's concepts around a 100 Mile Client Roster and what that means for the evolution of a knowledge worker economy in Canada's rural areas.

If you've got something interesting you'd like to talk about, I'm all ears.