Because I Had To

I quit a safe job to build something that didn't exist yet. Not because it was smart. Because I had no other choice.

I started my career as an entrepreneur—built a web agency in my 20's and sold it in 1999. From 2000–2012 I worked for other people, always with side projects simmering, waiting for the right moment.

In 2012, I read The Lean Startup and Running Lean, discovered companies like Science and BetaWorks. Startup fever hit hard.^[1] Foundational customer-development thinking like The Four Steps to the Epiphany shaped how I saw early-stage building.^[2]

I had no choice. I quit my job, because I had to.

Fast forward a few years (to 2015), and things are going well in my world.

I had co-founded Differential, a great growing company with a stellar reputation. And as a world-leading Meteor development shop, it's a pretty cool place to work.

But my goal was to go deep on a product, not services. To that end, we built several product MVPs inside Differential. Finally an opportunity came by that I couldn't resist, to take over an analytics product. It was a hard decision to leave the safety of the mothership.

I really, really wanted to build a product company. So I spun out of Differential because I had to.

Turned out, the analytics company was very hard. We battled technical debt and lukewarm investor interest. And we had painfully long cycles to onboard customers, because it's difficult for companies to share their customer data with third party analytics companies.

After a gut-wrenching team meeting (decision to pivot vs. persevere is all gut), we pivoted to focus on helping companies "own their data" and be capable to share it in an agile way.

We're getting a lot of encouragement that what we're building needs to exist. And we know it's going to be a long, hard effort. That's actually exciting.

We just can't bear leaving the world in it's current state.

We're building Astronomer because we have to.

— Ry