Today was my last day at OpenIO. It’s been a great gig from both a personal and professional standpoint. I was, however, missing something about my previous job and when the opportunity came along I decided to take it.

OpenIO made a good impression on me from the very beginning. Actually, the first time I met them during a press meeting in San Francisco I found their ideas a little bit odd for an object store, but when I dug deeper into the technology I understood the value and the potential. We had the opportunity to work together and get to know each other for quite some time in 2016. Eventually they proposed that I join the company, which I did at the beginning of 2017.

At that time I gave myself two years to decide if it was better to work with an established organization or as an independent. Well, it took me less than two years to decide and in this post you’ll find a few thought about this decision and my future!

Why I joined (and left) OpenIO

After following the market and writing about storage startups for years, I was eager to join one of them to know more about what happens inside and get a better understanding of some aspects that I was seeing only from the outside. I have to say that I had a lot of confirmations and a few surprises about the so called startup life. It is a continuous alternating of successes and failures, pleasure and frustration, growth and decline and so on. Exciting and challenging but also repetitive somehow, the day-to-day job was the most difficult part for me: more repetitive tasks and less traveling, meetings with people or opportunities to learn and share knowledge and opinions.

OpenIO team is full of great people and has grown a lot since my first day with them. More people, more customers and a larger community to support an ever growing and maturing product, but I wasn’t the right fit for this organization. I think that part of it comes from the fact that I was an Italian in a French organization, and even though they always tried to make me feel at home (by speaking in English for example), my laziness in learning French was a mistake. In fact, I missed a lot of the fun (like bantering at the coffee machine or in other networking occasions) and some internal communication channels were kind of inaccessible for me. Although I think that it could have happened with any other young European startup, I just underestimated this aspect until it was too late.

Welcome back Juku (and more)

Starting from today I’m an independent analyst again. And there is more coming with it!

I resumed my activity as an independent analyst, consultant and blogger on Juku.it and with Driven Talk podcast. But that’s just the beginning, I’ve also started a collaboration with Gigaom, for which I’ll be writing reports around data and cloud storage (the first two of them are already in the making!).

And this is for 2018. In fact, for 2019, I’ll be bringing a new exciting event focused on end users and real world IT, with an innovative and unique format, fueled by the same spirit that empowered my past initiatives across Europe and the US. I don’t want to spill the beans right now… but stay tuned on this!

You can expect to see me often at industry events again (starting next week with SFD17!!!), and I’m available to accept briefings with IT vendors (something I was really missing!).

Closing the circle

I’m back as an independent, ready to rock’n’roll!