A message from our CTO, Dmitry Traytel, about his time at Timehop
One of my favorite things about working at Timehop is the meta experience of Timehop reminding me about my work anniversary at Timehop. It’s not just the start date, it’s quite a few weeks leading up to that date. And with each passing year of this adventure, I find myself reliving the steps it took to get here, and the carefully laid plans I made about my career.
One of the more amusing memories I come across is how I transitioned from my previous job at Adobe to this one at Timehop. Each year Adobe hosts the 99U Conference which presents multiple speakers sharing their experience in the creative world. Three years ago, it took place in the second week of June, and one of those speakers was Rick Webb giving a talk called “You Can’t Plan for Everything, So Stop Trying”. A week later, he and I were working here together.
I think about that a lot these days. When I joined Timehop, only four people from the current team were working here and Nimbus was but a young baby chinchilla. We weren’t building our own ad tech, we had no concerns about getting hacked, and the idea of having our own clients was nowhere on the roadmap. Fast forward to today and we’re working through a global pandemic in our sweatpants, sending invoices to nearly a dozen publishers every month, and sending out newsletters to our users and to our own team members.
None of these things were a part of the original plan - and that’s ok! After three years of Timehop reminding me about the pastI find myself working and living in a present far different than anything I could have planned for. The products, the team, and the potential of what we are building today far exceeds anything I could have imagined back then. I'm glad I'm here to celebrate all of that, and I'm comfortable enough to stop trying to plan for what lies ahead.
