13.5 years (97.5%ile of active employees), 19 offices visited across 5 continents, 16.5 hours of massage credits, reward trips/holiday parties/offsites galore and untold lattes, omelets, and delicious lunches later… I’m leaving Google to get LA/US engineering off the ground at Celonis alongside Dustin Jackson Brian Oppenheim Brian Williams and others as a big stepping stone towards running my own company down the road.
Celonis is a German-founded series D (late stage) startup with headquarters in NYC and Munich with ML/graph-based software that simplifies fiddly manual business processes (e.g. invoicing) much like you’d do as a business analyst. They want to be US/Silicon Valley native and are hiring Googlers and others to make it so :). Our mission will be to build out their customer-facing web/app presence to scale up their user base by 10-100x. Why is this exciting to me?
-
Celonis has placed a lot of trust in us to build a large engineering organization and given us the freedom to do things how we want.
-
We’ll be hiring many smart people we want to work with for the long term. LA will be one of the Celonis hubs (alongside NYC and the Bay Area) which excites me as the local tech talent is amazing!
-
Celonis already makes money and wants to be around for the long term, things that appeal to me as a wannabe stay-at-home dad with a 1 year old :).
-
I will get out of the Google bubble and use some of the skills I’ve only gotten to use in my free time to build software (go laugh at my code if you’d like).
Google was such a huge part of my identity that it’s going to take some serious rehab before I stop saying I’m a Googler. It was a thrill ride the whole way and I’d recommend it to anyone - check out just a few photos. Credit goes to my managers, teammates, and the (overlapping) many lifelong friends I’ve made along the way, who collectively are what I’m going miss the most. I learned everything I know professionally from them:
- If you want scale and battle tested engineering solutions, Google is the place to be. I got to solve huge engineering problems including:
-
building distributed data serving reusing Google Search infrastructure to process 10s of millions of documents per second and answer queries in <200ms
-
designing ML models using trillion example+ training+serving
-
constructing pipelines/data validation to handle large, tricky data
-
having the honor of rewriting my own pipeline 3 times over the course of 6 years as requirements changed
-
applying these skills in multiple application domains
-
I invested in the hopes and dreams of the people I had the honor to manage. Seeing their successes motivated me day to day. I also drew joy from helping them navigate their career path whether that was growing on my team or moving elsewhere.
-
I figured out what YouTube/Search/App advertisers need in order to get a great return for their business without too much effort and built beautiful products that blew away their expectations. I learned how to communicate this in an inspiring organizational vision and collaborated cross-functionally with UX/PM/program managers to get this done.
-
I effectively operated in multiple organizations with misaligned priorities and large personalities by finding common ground in what was best for Google.
Picture is from my (abandoned) application to a reality TV show in 2008. Why not when you’re in LA :).
I’m thrilled to be getting started again! See ya at Celonis!
