What I've Learned So Far

Exciting news for me: this week I start my new job as a content marketer for BreakingPoint Systems here in Austin.

Just some of the reasons I’m stoked:

• BreakingPoint is a small(ish), fast-paced company that will provide me with daily opportunities to expand my business skills.
• The job description might have been written specifically with me in mind. Besides drawing heavily on my writing skills, the role will build on the chops I laid down as a marketer and social media pro over the past three years at Hoover’s. And even though I don’t already have specific grounding in the network security hardware business, I’ll be able to draw on the seven prior years that I spent in Hoover’s editorial department, when I covered hard-core tech like semiconductors and scientific instrumentation.
• I get to work alongside my good friend Kyle Flaherty. [Cue Troy McClure voice from The Simpsons . . . ] You may remember Kyle from his role as my co-panelist in this year’s South by Southwest Interactive session on sports metaphors. [End Troy McClure voice.] I know I’ll learn a lot from Kyle, as well as from our boss Pam O’Neal, whom I’ve already known for a couple of years in Austin’s social media circles.
• Kyle and I talk a lot with each other about fitness, but now we’ll get to work out together regularly. (He tells me that this was the aspect of my hire that made him most skittish, but that’s only because he knows I will CRUSH him.)

It’s bittersweet to leave Hoover’s after ten (!) years. Besides being the place where I’ve had the longest job tenure — I worked there longer than I lived in my boyhood hometown — Hoover’s is also where I learned the most about business, as both an analyst and practitioner, and where I made the most good friends in business.

I’m particularly grateful that Hoover’s gave me three starts in my career: as a full-time writer, as a marketer, and as a social media practitioner. I’m also pleased to say that I worked for ten years there without ever reporting to a bad manager, which sounds like some kind of miracle unless you’ve been inside Hoover’s walls and grasped its tradition as a workplace where people treat each other like human beings.

Oh, and in case anyone’s curious, it was purely my decision to leave Hoover’s. I was ready for something new, the opportunity at BreakingPoint opened up at a perfect time, . . . and the rest is history. I’m glad I worked on — and in some cases built — the ground floor of Hoover’s social media efforts, and I look forward to seeing how the company grows in years to come.

So, the short version: cool new job, nifty people and product, starts Wednesday, woo-hoo!

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