Being a part of something special

In my career, I can think of only one time I've felt like I was a part of something truly special.  At Liquid Web, I was part of small team of developers and engineers that built out Liquid Web's cloud product called Storm on Demand.  It was a pretty amazing accomplishment for a handful of people over a thirteen month period from inception to public release.  Despite being a very niche player in the market, we were only a few months too late to be the 2nd public cloud provider after Amazon.  Unfortunately, during those few months, several other players also got their clouds out, so when we released, it didn't make quite the splash we had hoped.  Don't get me wrong, it was wildly successful, I just think some people had unrealistic expectations.  It was really an amazing accomplishment, and despite the fact that I've since left the company, I still count it as the best experience of my career thus far.

So, I think I'm about to have my second such experience.  At Rackspace, we've formed a Data Services "practice area" (practice as in law practice, not basketball practice, it took me a while).  A year or two ago, we acquired a startup called ObjectRocket that specializes in providing MongoDB as a service.  Their focus is on providing the best MongoDB experience out there and taking all of the headaches of administrating a MongoDB installation away from the developer so they can just focus on the code.  So now, ObjectRocket, the CloudDatabases teams, and CloudBigData team (I'm on this one) are joining forces to form this group.  There's a ton of work to do to get where we need to be, but it's exciting to be a part of, and even if we only accomplish half of what it has set out to do, it should be huge.

It's also possible that this ends up being a giant disaster and implodes.  Given my conversations with the leadership so far, and based on their personalities and management style, I don't feel like this is a big concern.  We've got the resources of Rackspace behind us, and we have the right type of pragmatism and excitement and technical know-how to make this succeed.

If this sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, please contact me.  We need your help.  I think this is a fantastic opportunity, and I'd love to see some of my friends and former coworkers (those aren't mutually exclusive sets) be a part of it.