Summary

Matt Rocklin announces he is stepping back from Coiled, Dask, and Python open source work to reassess his life direction. Coiled has been scaled down to a small, profitable operation serving existing customers, with preferred shareholders bought out. Dask will continue in maintenance mode focused on stability rather than innovation. Rocklin reflects that the work stopped being fun when startup challenges like marketing became intractable, and he's choosing to embrace a period of deliberate stillness rather than grinding forward.

Key Insight

When the challenges of building a company shift from exciting technical problems to intractable business ones, stepping back and embracing deliberate stillness can be more productive than grinding forward.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  At some point turning the crank of productivity turns to grinding, becoming less productive/fun/satisfying.

• 5

  I stopped having fun a while ago, both because I've been at it a while, and because I ran into problems that I didn't know how to solve.

• 5

  Coiled problems were harder than Dask problems, and when issues like marketing became our biggest challenge they started to feel intractable.

• 4

  Time is finite, and there's a tradeoff between cranking and exploring.

• 6

  I'm not doing much, and oddly that seems like the most interesting and challenging path for me.

• 3

  Like lots of well-used open source, Dask today is more focused more on stability than on pushing new features.

• 5

  Financially, while Coiled is unlikely to ever become the next trillion-dollar company, it is now nicely profitable and can continue indefinitely.

• 5

  I don't know what my next path is yet (start a new company? get a job? get a life?) but I look forward to finding out.

Tone

reflective