Why I joined Bump
Last May I wrote down a few words to capture why I had decided to join Bump Technologies. It's been nearly 9 months for me at the company so I wanted to publish these thoughts with a few updates since then.
When I came back from my much needed vacation in early March, it was finally time to look for work. I stayed under the radar for about a week, but soon I started reaching out to friends and other interesting people I've met over time. I booked lunches and dinners to learn about what they were doing, and what cool and interesting companies they'd heard of. I responded back to some recruiters that had reached out to me. I also started emailing companies that I thought were doing interesting things.
I ended up interviewing at more places than I expected, which was at the same time both flattering and puzzling. There were some Product Management positions, some Software Engineering positions, and even a couple Project Management positions. The variety of the jobs was definitely food for thought.
In the middle of all this I met up with a former professor of mine, Sep Kamvar. He made me question my decision of entertaining any management jobs at all. He wondered why I wanted to let my engineering chops lay fallow so early in my career. This got me thinking. I thought back to all my experiences over the past few years, including a stint as a Product Manager, and when I thought back to it, the times I enjoyed the most was when I was building something. Be it design or engineering.
After much thinking, it became clear to me that the ideal position for me would be as a startup engineer. In this position I wouldn't stop being a builder and still design what I was building. So I switched gears. I started looking exclusively at startup engineering jobs, keeping only a couple of other options open.
Man oh man, are there interesting startups in the valley. Though I had narrowed my search substantially I found myself looking at quite a few incredible companies. Of all the choices one kept me intrigued, and highly engaged.
Of all the companies I was looking at, Bump had uncanny similarities of what I had attempted before with at zintin. But that wasn't just it, there are a few other companies that are working on products more like zintin. No, Bump had a special quality that made it very interesting to me. It took me a good amount of thinking to figure out what it was.
As far as I can think, Bump is the only company that has achieved something really special. They have made popular a social physical-virtual interaction. They have successfully bridged in people's minds the two different worlds: the real world, where they interact with others by shaking hands, patting on the shoulder, and yes, fist bumping, with the virtual world, where they interact with people by sending them photos, chatting and playing games.
An important thing to note here is that this not like the Wii (and now Kinect), which also facilitates a physical-virtual interaction. The Wii is still centered around a screen in one place. The Bump interaction is distributed, any two people can Bump with each other at any temporal or spatial point of their choosing.
The other part of this social physical-virtual bridge is that in the modern day, much of people's self has flowed into the virtual universe. With Bump, suddenly this virtual self no longer has to be disjointed from the physical self.
Bump was the first to give me an offer, but I hadn't crystalized these thoughts yet into my mind. I continued interviewing at other places that were still interesting. These other places also had smart and really cool people, with products that were genuinely delighting their customers. But in the end I had to make a call. Bump really was a product that excited me at a much deeper level than the rest. Its potential to be an important part of the way people interact with their world was just too interesting to pass up.
So 9 months since, how have things fared?
I started in the midst of a big redesign/recode of the entire Bump system. We were updating everything: the app, the network protocol, the servers, everything to a newer, faster and more scalable architecture. This is one of those things that destroys software companies. It's one of those periods where there is very little feature development done and delays in shipping are inevitable, leading to disastrous failures and loss of market position.
Yet at Bump we avoided this fate. I knew coming in that the team was incredibly capable. This was proven to me in the course of the next few months. We had our share of delays as expected from such a venture but in July 2010 we launched the 2.0 iPhone App causing a huge jump in usage numbers.
Soon after I jumped projects to bring the iPhone API to the 2.0 architecture, which we released in November. I also simultaneously started working on getting the 2.0 Android version out. This is where I am concentrating full time these days, working primarily on the Java front end, and fixing bugs in the Scala backend of the Android app.
In the 9 months since I joined the company I've been involved in three different projects, jumping onto whatever project I would be most useful on. Each project has been important to the company and each where I've had a chance to make major impact. I work with some of the smartest and most effective people I've ever met, and we are quickly moving forward into massive uncharted but incredibly interesting territory in the mobile world.
On Christmas Day we saw ridiculous amounts of data going through our system with no signs of stopping. We've managed all this with a very small but agile (in every sense of the word) team. When I joined we were about 10 people and now are 15.
Even though we are small and mind-bendingly effective, we still need more people to continue growing at the pace we are. So if you are a designer, hacker, engineer or an all around smart person we need your help! If you're interested in joining Bump, you should contact me or apply through our website.
