Today I announced that I’d be leaving Beyond Pricing, the company I founded 6 years ago and led from just an idea about how to bring dynamic pricing to vacation rentals to a company of nearly 70 talented folks, with double-digit millions in revenue, over $45m raised, and huge growth prospects ahead.

Leaving a company you founded is incredibly difficult, but it’s made easier knowing it’s in the capable hands of my longtime cofounder and friend, David Kelso, who will lead through this next phase of product-centric growth.

I wrote more about what it means for Beyond Pricing here, but I wanted to also talk about what’s next for me.

First, I’m taking a little time for myself, which, when you have a lovely wife and two amazing little daughters (ages 5 months and 2 years), means time with your family. With everything in life, but especially with starting a company, your success is not your own but it’s built on the backs of those that support you. When you’re married, that’s your spouse, through and through. They make the sacrifices that help you be able to push yourself and create something great. Our last, large round of funding closed days after my second daughter was born and I barely took any time off. In the last few weeks, I realized how little time I got with her and I’ve been so grateful to be able to get to spend that time now.

But anyone who knows me, knows I don’t do well being idle.

Eventually, I’d like to build another great company, this time based in Santa Cruz, a fantastic surf-and-university town that my family has been tied to since my grandpa founded UC Santa Cruz over 50 years ago. There’s an incredibly talented community of folks here who value the outdoors and the ocean and the beach but who often are forced to commute over the hill to large tech companies, taking hours a day away from their time with family and the things they moved here to enjoy. I’m looking forward to connecting much more to that community and thinking about what we might build next together.

In the interim, I’ll continue the long tradition of giving back to the tech ecosystem that helped support Beyond Pricing in it’s early days through angel investing. Part of what makes Silicon Valley unique is the continuous flywheel of startup founders building companies and then investing in the next crop of ambitious startups.

If you know any incredibly ambitious founders building something great, I’d love to talk to them. The experience of building and scaling a mid-market B2B SaaS company through the early stages all the way through to a major investment from one of the top-tier venture firms, Bessemer, comes with a lot of learnings, which I’ll be writing about more. But it also means I can hopefully be helpful to the companies I invest in.

While I’m incredibly curious and love new and interesting industries and business models, here are a few areas where I have more expertise than others, and where I’d love to meet founders solving problems in new ways:

• Optimization software (using data and algorithms to improve outcomes)
• Enterprise software
• Travel tech
• Transportation and logistics

I’m incredibly excited both for the future of Beyond Pricing and for what’s next for me. I’m lucky to have had great investors, employees, partners, and especially a cofounder who believed in me and what we’re building and who will take Beyond Pricing to the next level.

Keep in touch.