I know, I know -- what
kind of a person abandons their blog for so long?! Me - that's who. I won't try
to defend my excuses as good ones, but they'll have to do. Actually all of my
excuses roll up into one fat one - LIFE!
Right around the time of my
last post, my first kid was turning 1 and I was coming off my self-imposed
hiatus and into a new gig leading the digital practice for GameStop. From there it was a proverbial roller
coaster of sorrow (losing my dad & best friend in August ’11 after almost a
year of health issues), change (moving the family to Northern California in
September ’11) and pure joy (the birth of our second kid in December ’11).
As amazing of a job as
that has been for the last 3 ½ years, one of the unfortunate by-products of the
gig was a “no public commentary without prior approval” mandate that made the
act of blogging one of process and permission rather than harmless rants and
observations. Aren’t public
companies fun?!
Besides this small bump in
the road, the GameStop gig was an amazing opportunity to yet again help a large
incumbent leverage its place in the ecosystem (this time in gaming) to evolve
its business to one that not only continues its market dominance in its core
business but also boldly strikes out into new and adjacent businesses as a path
to helping ensure future viability.
In my time there we accomplished quite a bit in a relatively short
period of time, taking the companies revenues from sub-$100MM in ’09 to over
$600MM in ’12. I’m extremely proud
of what we accomplished there and I look forward to the next chapter in my
career, which will continue to include advising and mentoring early stage
companies.
So now back to my
blog. The cool thing about reading
through your old posts is that you can reflect back on how right on or full of
s**t you were about stuff - and I gotta say the shovel is pretty light. One service
that I blogged about (Groupon) has had quite an epic ride these last few years,
two others (Tunezee and Timebridge) were acquired, another (Rixty) is still
chugging along in the games sector and another (The Peek) is pretty much off
the grid as predicted.
While this walk down
memory lane was fun, I gotta say that the best part of getting this blog post
up was surfing through all the stuff that came up when I went onto Google
Images looking for an "I'm Back" image. This was the best (and
safest) one I could come up with - thanks to whoever created it.
So now that I'm back on
the grid I'll do my best post a bit more regularly. Looking forward to seeing
what the future brings!
