John’s Blog

I have to say that my last few weeks at Reactivity were about as good as I could have imagined them. I’m going to write a different post later tonight about the emotions that I’ve felt/am feeling, but wanted to focus this post on everyone else.

My transition out was relatively long, mostly happening over the last three months of 2004 — that was an intentional decision that Glenn & I made together. Was probably longer than I would have liked, probably shorter than he would have liked. But in the end, I think it worked out very well. It meant that during October and November I was able to really focus on three things: (1) recruiting my replacements, (2) transitioning my customer interactions to other folks, and (3) aggressively handing responsibilities to other people at Reactivity, but in a way that I could support them while I was still around. As a result, December was a pretty easy month — took a trip to see Fidelity (one of the best organizations that I’ve ever worked with), spent some time with the new CTO & VP Products, and just generally got things into a shape that I think we can all be proud of.

Our holiday dinner was very touching to me as well — during a section of dinner, Glenn, Brian, Mike, Dan & Bill — all pillars of Reactivity — each got up and said some very nice things about working with me. I felt like it was a little bit backwards; I’ve been very lucky to work with each of them, and more, of course. They also made me this really cool plaque — it has a faceplate from one of our units on it, and has inscriptions from most of the folks that I’ve worked with over the past few years. Really nice.

I’d say that my interactions with our customers has been uniformly positive as well – every one was supportive, encouraging, and wanted to maintain our relationship beyond the life of Reactivity. This is the first time in my career where I’ve had really meaningful relationships with customers, and their reactions to my departure were very important to me.

I have to say that all of this just reflects extremely well on everyone that I’ve worked with, and highlights how lucky I’ve been and how challenging it will be to find a place that’s anywhere near as good/interesting/supportive to go to next.