A Chapter Well Written

Oh do I have some good news….

The past two and a half years have been amazing for my career. I was able to leave my estate at the IBM cube city in East Lansing to come to a little company called Livio. I was hired on as an Android developer, but overall a general software engineer to get anything done that needed to be. I was excited to get to work on actual coding projects.

After a week of being on the payroll another engineer joined the force, Phil Danne. And at that point I thought wow, this is a pretty small team; hovering right around 11-12 people it was awesome to be a huge part of such a small team. However, just as the sun was shining, a storm cloud rolled in. That same week, the head and only other engineer told us he was leaving. The sure sense of panic rushed through me.

What was going to happen? Would I still have a job? Would I be able to handle all the challenges that were to lie in front of me? And who was this other engineer? Could I trust him to carry some of the weight? What did I get myself into?

I found out Phil was a great engineer. There was a certain amount of luck that he was the engineer that sat across the table. Even to this day I’m not sure if there were any two other people who would have been able to pull ahead after the immediate hole they were put in.  The task at hand was not simple, and in fact the challenge it presented helped shape the engineer I am today.  Since that day, the technologies we worked on have taken off. Though it started out rough, once the software was up to our standards it was pretty amazing, and people took notice.

A start-up is always looking and waiting for the day they get their big break. For Livio, that day is today. I couldn’t be happier to announce that as of today Livio is a fully-owned subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. It’s amazing to see a complete validation of my time, work, and what I have believed to be true in the connected space.

This part of the story has come to and end as it’s time to move forward with what can only be described as (Queue super sappy  dramatic music) the future of infotainment.  I’m thrilled to be a part of this and can’t wait to see the things we work on to be on the road in the coming years.