🍐#143 Closing chapters, acquisitions, and sabbaticals.

Hey,

Big things happened to your favorite markepear🍐. And because of that I’ve decided to go on a sabbatical for a few months. I’ll still write this newsletter and blog during the break but I am just not sure how frequently.

Took me a while to write this. Needed a minute to put what I feel in words. But the neptune.ai chapter of my career is really officially over. Happy, proud, nostalgic, sad. Tired (though this one could be because of our new 2month old addition to the family;)).

In December we’ve been acquired by OpenAI and a moonshot goal that I put on one of our internal presentations, that “the training run that gets us to AGI will be logged to Neptune” may actually turn out to be true. Time will tell.

And Neptune is winding down it’s operations completely (so you may want to screenshot some of those cool things we’ve done on the website if you haven’t already ;)).

Thanks to Neptune I found my true passion -> developer marketing. I was a chess pro, poker player, theoretical physicist, stock trader, and a data scientist. And yet marketing to devs gave me so much joy that I’ve decided to create Developer Markepear and to share my learnings with others.

Extremely happy that cards aligned this way and a moment of “somebody needs to learn marketing” hit us at Neptune. And with my love for learning messy things I decided to take a leap.

Huge thank you to:

• all the amazing people who worked on our marketing/GTM team (do let me know if you are hiring, some folks are still exploring),

• advisors who helped me learn along the way,

• leadership and founders as we worked through thick and thin,

• investors for their wisdom and poise when we thought we were smart (and probably were just smartasses),

• and all the amazing neptune people I met along the way that made this journey so much more fun.

• my business partner Piotr, CEO, the driver of change who pushed me to where I’d never push myself. I wouldn't be where I am now if it wasn’t for him.

• and finally my wife Magda (I know you are reading this for the pear puns but still ;)) for supporting me throughout this whole time. You are my rock. Thank you.

And while many Neptuners went to OpenAI and other exciting places I am taking a sabbatical. Neptune's acquisition coincided with my second kiddo being born. And while in startups there never seems to be a good time to take rest, it is hard to find a better spot than this.

So for the next few months the only role that I have lined up is CDO (Chief Dad Officer). And after that back to marketing cool stuff ;)