You truly have “helped build something that will change people’s lives for the better.” It’s funny and bittersweet to read comments about Instagram, Facebook, ad Flickr and to remember you doing social network analytics and visualization of context-aware mobile photo and video sharing connected to a social graph, GPS geotagging, and Bluetooth copresence detection…seven years ago. You are a leader, innovator, and a doer who really has made and will continue to make a profound difference in how people imagine, understand, communicate with, and shape our emerging web of the world.

I feel grateful and honored to have worked with you in so many profound and enjoyable ways over the years. The list is kind of amazing (UC Berkeley School of Information, Garage Cinema Research Group, Mobile Media Metadata Project, Foundations of New Media Course, Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and Yahoo!) and even more amazing are the insight, foresight, rigor, passion, good humor, compassion, intelligence, creativity, perseverance, and integrity you have brought to all your endeavors.

I am very happy for you for your new developments in your personal and professional life and know you will do amazing things that will make all our lives better (and more fun).

Enjoy your new love, life, work, and your glorious return to New York. I hope to see you soon here, there, and everywhere.

“Finally, I’m proud to finally have the courage to step away, which anyone who has worked for many years on something they love knows, is an exceptionally difficult thing to do.”

…amen to that. And just so you know, I don’t think you can ever entirely step away, even when you’re no longer “an employee”. But that’s the price of actually caring deeply about something, I guess.

Good luck with What Comes Next.