Next Play - Leaving LinkedIn

LinkedIn...

About five years ago, Reid Hoffman told me his visions of his social network startup - LinkedIn being a massive company, connecting people with opportunity. Today, Reid's vision has been realized: LinkedIn is listed on NYSE with one of the most successful IPOs, and its brand is a household name.

In the following five years, together with some of the smartest people, I enjoyed building up LinkedIn's search infrastructure which powers the Search Properties (People, Jobs, Company etc.), Signal, the homepage, and SenseiDB. I am very happy that my work has brought value to millions of users, and a lot of it was contributed back to the open source community.

I am extremely grateful to Reid and Jean-Luc for letting me be part of the LinkedIn story.

Twitter

The reason for my transition to Twitter from LinkedIn would be better explained by "why going to Twitter" than "why leaving LinkedIn".

Problem-set

My interest has always been realtime and semi-structured search systems. I feel the web is becoming more structured and more realtime.

There is only a handful of companies in the world that serve billions of queries per day on top of hundreds of billions of documents. Amongst them, only one company can say: the world is real-time, and our corpus is expanding at 400 million documents a day (and growing, fast...)! So, when I learned Twitter is building the next generation search infrastructure, the opportunity is too big not to pursue.

Culture:

Twitter's open source repertoire with 77 projects with 155 participants. The open source culture drives passion and innovation, and feeds into Twitter's fast paced hacker culture. For me, I have especially been interested in the work Twitter has done on realtime search extensions to Lucene. To be able to help further the contribution is super exciting to me.

Next play