For those that don’t know I am leaving Yahoo! and moving to a Boston-based start-up that focuses on consumer backups. Yesterday was my final day in the office and last night was my going away party (thank you Yahoo!). Yesterday was an extremely bittersweet day. On one hand I am excited for the scenery change and the prospect of new challenges and on the other it was hard to say goodbye to many people I consider very good friends. Over the past two-and-a-half years I have formed some extremely good friends: We have been to battle together, had the joy of toiling away our nights and weekends together and developing cool new products together. So saying goodbye, even “goodbye for now,” was harder than I expected and the goodbye party was extremely humbling for me. The fact that such effort was put into it (with gifts and all) left me slightly embarrassed and I consoled myself by thinking that everyone was there simply for the free food and booze. It is strange to think that as a group we averaged roughly 50 working hours per week conservatively, and there are 47 weeks in a year counting vacation time, so in two-and-a-half years I spent 5875 hours with all these people. Wow! Almost 6000 hours my our lives spent together and then just like that the paths change and I am off to spend many thousands more hours with a new group. Like I said, exciting and sad at the same time. One thing that was less sad and more astonishing was the amount of crap that I managed to pile up in my office over that time. Seriously, if you saw the stuff I was packing and throwing away you’d think I hobo with a passion for hi-tech had been camping out in my office. I have to work on that at the next gig.

So to all you from Maven/Yahoo! that might be reading this let me just say thank you!! I was serious when I said it was my honor to work beside you and I will never forget everything we accomplished and how we accomplished it.