I’ll Just Be Up the Street
In the middle of 2007 I began a blog.
And, like more than 11,000 other people, I installed Lijit on my blog.
And, like more than 11,000 other people, I got an email from a person named Tara Anderson welcoming me to the Lijit family.
“This must be automated,” I thought to myself. So I replied to the email. “Hey Tara, I think Lijit is awesome. In fact, I have a couple of clients that this would work well for.”
A couple of hours later, Tara responded.
“Thanks, Micah! We think our wijit is pretty cool too. I would like to introduce you to Todd Vernon, our CEO…”
And, a few days later, I headed up to Louisville to meet the Lijit team. While there, I ran into Seth Levine, who was an investor in ServiceMagic , the first company I worked at in Colorado. We talked for a bit, and made plans to connect later.
Over the next few weeks, Todd and I continued to talk. I introduced him to a few of the clients I had worked with at Current Wisdom, and then one day at lunch Todd asked if I would be interested in joining the Lijit team. Initially, I was unsure, until Seth gave me this advice:
“Micah, you are an idiot. Take the job.”
So I did.
Now, almost two years later the time has come for me to move on.
I was asked to help run a 2009 Techstars company as their CEO (not Techstars itself), and after talking it over with, well, a bunch of my mentors, and with Todd’s support, I decided it was the right thing to do.
My time at Lijit has been amazing. We have grown from 1,000 publishers to more than 11,000. From 11,000,000 monthly pageviews to more than 325,000,000. From 12 people to just over 30. Other than Google, we are the most used search widget on the web.
And, what amazes me most, is we still reach out to each new user and welcome them to our family.
I am not leaving Boulder, and as I told the team at Lijit, “I’ll just be up the street.” I say the same to all Lijit users (both current and future), I am always available.
And, while I might be leaving Lijit as an employee; I am still a member of our family.
Thanks Lijit for the last two years. I’m excited to see whats next.