Changing Rides

For the last four years, our family has ridden the roller coaster that is entrepreneurship, with exciting highs that take your breath away and scary lows that make you want to close your eyes.  My husband is a remarkable man, gifted with the confidence to make every twist and turn smooth and carefree.  His capacity for learning new things, solving hard problems and negotiating relationships keeps him ahead of the game.  And though his capacity is far beyond what anyone else I know can absorb, he too has a limit.  You can read his own words about leaving Snoball on his blog.

So we found ourselves stepping off the self-employment roller coaster and settling into more of a traditional ride.  He didn't have to search long before companies started lining up to interview him.  I'm not the only one that recognizes something special in him.  At the end of November, he started a new job with Indeed.com.  I had never even heard of them, but they are apparently the largest job search engine on the web, even surpassing monster.com.  Shows how long I've been out of the loop.

His title is "labs hacker."  Doesn't that sound like him?  If I understand it correctly, his team comes up with new solutions to site-wide problems, and makes sure they work on a small subset of the traffic.  Then they pass it off to the development team to make it work site-wide, and start on a new problem.  So he gets to learn new things and solve hard problems without the CEO-ness that never really fit comfortably.

We were riding the roller coaster together and I was excited with him, but I felt the weight of it too.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a smidge relieved to step off.  I know we'll take that ride again sometime.  He has way too many incredible ideas to not try it again.  But we all need some time to recuperate. And I'm equally as excited to see him have the opportunity to decompress some and get out from under what was never intended to be a burden.

Only God knows where this new adventure will lead.  But I don't think it will be quite so white-knuckled.  I'm honored to be a passenger with the man that is immeasurably more than I could have asked or imagined when I prayed for a husband.