bit of nostalgia this past week: Friday was sort of my last day at PayPal... or at least it was my last day running the PayPal Developer Network program. PDN was the "baby" i birthed in 2001, and somehow managed to nurse along over the past three years into a pretty decent-size technical education site and community for some ~300,000 E-Commerce developers.
i feel proud of what i've accomplished here, both with PDN and with PayPal. this year in particular we pulled off some great stuff: we delivered the PayPal Web Services offering in the spring, held the eBay/PayPal Developer conference this summer in New Orleans, and got the PayPal Hacks book out in print just last month, with help from our friends at O'Reilly. (*and special congrats to author Dave Nielsen, who imaginatively proposed to his fiance in the book acknowledgements!). with all that done, it's a good time to pass the baton to new blood and let them take it over the next mountaintop...
looking back i've had a lot of great times at PayPal, and made some wonderful friends here. a few folks i care about a lot put together this terrific "Top 10" DMC roast list as a going-away present for me on Friday. it's hilarious, and some of it is a bit embarrassing, but it's definitely a tongue-in-cheek summary of my days at the 'Pal :)
the other related piece of news is my wife Saya is pregnant (surprise!), and that definitely will bring some change into our lives next year. so perhaps now is a good time for me to step back and get a little perspective, recharge the batteries, figure out where i'm headed next. i'm going to take a few months off to spend with Saya, visit with family, and get ready for another great adventure -- not to mention daddy-hood!
as to what that new adventure may involve? ... well, i'd like to come back in January and see what's new at PayPal & eBay, perhaps see if i can find something that gets my creative juices flowing. then again, both with Google and several other promising new startups, there appears to be some renewed fire in Silicon Valley (finally!). yet another possible direction, i've been doing some reading and research on microfinance topics, and it certainly feels like there's a tipping point about to happen in that area.
so there's plenty of exciting stuff i'm curious to get my hands on, and lots of new ideas to roll around in my brain... but probably the most exciting of all of these will be a new baby to get ready for in the spring. guess 2005 will be a bit of an exciting year... woohoo!
ps - thanks PayPal, for the wonderful memories. i won't forget a thing :)