Bill Watt

My grandfather never went very far in school. He was working 3 jobs by his early teens and always loved the idea of studying. My guess is that this was probably because for him learning was a treat and not something he'd actually had to do. He told stories about doing other neighborhood kids homework just to learn what they were learning in school. During WWII he go the chance to take a class at MIT where he learned about "the entropy of steam" and he had a funny story about the final exam where he did the calculations all in US measurements, then thought he needed to convert it all to metric so he redid all his work.

In the 10 years I lived with him after college his happiest times alone were when he was sitting at the kitchen table with a pencil and paper figuring out the answer to something or other. And you need to understand that some of these were math problems (not big physics things... just a random math or calculation that was stuck in his head) or designing the next bit of machinery for the house. By the time he moved out his basement had more than a few creations for watering his yard or similar practical things.

Anyway, being that he was a new to America child of the depression he was very fond of telling me how proud he was of my dad for getting a college degree and that I should learn as much as I can. One of his favorite expressions was, "an education is the one thing they can't take away from you" so this pic reminded me of him:

http://twitpic.com/18ch18

His other favorite expression was, "Today is a good day to be on this side of the grass" and he lived to be almost 95 so I'll believe him on both counts.

Well well... it was a very busy summer afterall.

In late August I got a call from a Ed Zschau, a recruiter friend with who'd I'd first talked to back about 2 years ago when I was looking to leave eBay. He'd had some interesting leads but I ended up finding the Current gig through my friend Danny. This time he said he had something that might be a good fit and wondered if I was looking for something new. I had been on a few exploratory rounds with different places but nothing serious. So I had a call with Ed and ran through the high level details. Next up had a call with Kevin, the CEO, and then went in for a meeting with the Outright team. After a couple more meetings in a 2 week span of time they made me an offer and I gave my notice at Current. All very quick but it had all the right characteristics of a place I'd love.

On the Current side leaving was an interesting experience. I had really enjoyed my time there and felt like I was just scratching the surface of what we could accomplish but the call of an 8 person startup where I could play a bigger role was just too good to pass up. Suffice it to say that the Current folks were awesome to me, the going away week of festivities was awesome, and thanks to all the social networking tools I'm able to stay in touch. And btw- the way I measure success is by how many things dropped when I left and so far that count is at one (Sorry Melody for not getting that update done!).

Now I've been at Outright.com for 5 weeks (tomorrow starts week #6) and it is turning out to be exactly what I was looking for. Here's a super short list of the perks as I'm trying to keep this good for public consumption:

• 8 awesome people and a cool, early stage product
• added exposure to inner workings of the management team
• around the corner from eBay and my whole social circle there
• 5.5 miles from home (no $200+ monthly train ticket and I'm actually riding my bike to work... sometimes)

"All of us have done a lot of stuff and none of us know what to do right now" - Terry Gilliam, Lost in La Mancha

What a great movie. What an awesome story. Painful to watch.

I'm not sure what to say but these are the people I would like to meet in life. Wonderfully creative types who would look at me funny and not understand my silly, non-creative ways.