On Leaving GitHub and Joining OpenSea

After about 4 years, — I’m leaving the best job I’ve ever had in my career. I’ve always been a fanboy of GitHub, I often say I “grew up” on GitHub. I only vaguely remember the early days where we reviewed code on a projector and took notes on a notepad. Then came GitHub and I fell in love with a product for the first time in my life. 

As I reflect on this milestone, I know I leave behind an amazing team that has gone through so much and brought so many amazing products to developers. Together, we brought Actions from its early Alpha days to a fully fledged automation product which powers CI/CD for the majority of developers in the world. We built GitHub Packages, acquired and helped look after npm, continued to ship amazing new features to GitHub CLI and Desktop — and that was just the last 2 years of my time there. GitHub’s come a long way from the early days when I joined – figuring out the right solution for management structure and growing the team to almost 300. All of this to say, it’s been a great ride and I want to thank the amazing team at GitHub — I’ll be cheering you all on as a fanboy from the outside.

So why join OpenSea. It’s actually really simple — OpenSea’s mission speaks to me, and the team is made up of some of the most genuine people you’ll meet. Their commitment to the cause is like no other. I’m excited by their work to build a creator-first marketplace where makers have unlimited freedom to bring their work to life how they see fit, and share it with people however they want.

It’s for those reasons (and the excitement of the unknown) that I’m as excited to join OpenSea as I was to join GitHub. The notable difference, however, is when I joined GitHub, it was in a very established ecosystem: the doubt of version control and peer code reviews had already been worked out of the industry. That’s not the case just yet for NFTs. I and these amazing people at OpenSea get to help establish this new industry and economy – regardless of the timing. They say a bear market is for the builders. It’s an opportunity to focus on what matters most – what’s critical for a successful community and is pushing the NFT ecosystem forward. 

So my objective at OpenSea is simple. Give builders, creators, and their fans direct access – no middle-person, no institution setting the rules. Let creativity reign and the best work rise unhindered by a system meant to extract all profits from builders and overcharge their communities. I and everyone at OpenSea are committed to this vision and we’ll work hard to keep pushing every boundary to bring it to reality.

To the OpenSea team, I’m humbled to join you on this journey. You’ve accomplished so much so already, I’m ready to jump in and help us scale further and make the OpenSea community stronger, safer and ever more connected.

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