[assumptions - 15]

It’s always been my assumption that I’d keep living in the mountains. It’s a
strange feeling to actively consider something that goes so much against the
‘natural grain’ of my life, to pick up and move, to work for someone else
instead of running a business, to pay rent and live in a city.

Maybe that’s what humans do. We coast through life, and anything contrary to
that feels like a fish leaping out of water, not sure they’ll be able to
breathe if they land outside the channel.

Boston is an exciting possibility. The jobs there are good and relatively
plentiful -- MIT’s presence makes it one of the two tech centers on the east
coast, not the startups in the shadow of massive financiers, all catering to
rich investors like the culture in New York, and not quite so new and shiny as
the South and East of San Francisco sprawl of chip designers and network
systems vendors around Stanford and Berkeley. It manages to stand on its own.

I like the people I know there. There’s a fair number, and it’s one of the
places that seems to have enough young people to draw more just for the
critical mass of it, not for any one reason. Portland does this and Boston,
too. 

The job postings which I’ve not had enough time to peruse yet are sitting there
tantalizingly. There are companies out there that want my skill set for serious
money. I wonder just how much time I have to give up to work for one. I haven’t
held down a job like that for someone else in so long, I’ve forgotten what the
rhythm feels like.

HubSpot sounds like an amazing opportunity, and Online Buddies sounds good in a
work-hard sort of way. HubSpot tries to make work so much fun you never leave,
and tempts you in with promises of ‘vacation whenever you want to, no fixed
hours, just come work for us and have fun doing it’. The videos they post on
their site look like they were shot in the late evening, and the staff is still
there. Half of them are playing ping-pong and another half are having a
discussion over beer, but they’re still in the office mid-evening. It’s a trap
of exactly the sort that’s meant for me. It worked at Wondermill and it would
work again. Google tries it, but these guys are a smaller company that doesn’t
even have to pretend to be serious and corporate.

I’m worried about Blumenthals -- I want to keep my relationship with them, and
I’d hate to be committed to them too much to have free time outside of work,
too. Those resumé items don’t write themselves, and I like to have time to play
with new shiny things.

I should write a resumé. I haven’t done it in a decade, and I think I’ve given
feedback on more resumés than I’ve written by at least ten times. It’s a bit
like shooting in the dark, trying to guess what a year 2011 tech company that
likes to have fun wants to hear from someone who last worked in a tech startup
in 2001.