End of a Californian Era

Here my colleague and friend Michael and I wait to board our connecting flight to KC from SLC.  We had our last Kickoff event last night, which was our dinner party at the Strand House on Manhattan Beach, which is where we went last time too.  It was a ton of fun, as I really enjoy these events.  But it was also a bit sad, as my company is in the process of being acquired by another company.  My time at Actuate has been great in many ways.  The culture really works for me, and we're all pretty sure that's going to change from what it is that we have now, which is largely because we are a small company based in Silicon Valley with a CEO who wants us to have fun.  Our new overlords are a huge company (16 times bigger!) based in eastern Canada who certainly are more traditionally corporate, so there will be changes, it's just a matter of what and how much.

At the dinner party, I found myself to be unexpectedly sad, and in talking to the other "old-timers" (I've been at the company for almost 12 years), many of them were sad too and were a little emotional during the evening.  We're a pretty tight-knit group, as we work closely together on a lot of different things, and it really is like a family in a lot of ways.  I think we all kind of realized that while most of us should keep our jobs, it'll never really be the same again, and this represented the last hurrah of what we've known and loved for so long.  Today when I boarded the plane, it hit me again as I took off, not knowing what was ahead for all of us in the new company, but knowing it won't be like what we left.