As several people know by now, I have accepted a position at Deseret Digital Media as Director of Development. For those who don’t know, Deseret Digital Media is owned by the LDS Church, and is in charge of all the web & mobile technology for the church’s for-profit companies. This includes KSL.com, DeseretBook.com, DeseretNews.com, and several others. I will be the Director of Development for Deseret News’s website, mobile applications, etc.
For the last four years I’ve been working at Dating DNA, LLC as the CTO, and have enjoyed every moment. It has been a great ride and a lot of work. When I started we had one website on one server. Dating DNA now has over 40 iPhone Apps, several APIs powering the apps, and dozens of servers and services. It has been a challenging and rewarding experience scaling and doing just about everything from the servers to the front-end. From only a thousand users to reaching millions of users and devices, it has been a wonderful experience.
The Dating DNA team has been a great to work with. Our small company of five people has accomplished so much over the years, and I feel we do really good work. We get along and work well together.
The decision to leave Dating DNA has been a hard one. I frequently was asked by others companies to send in resumes and come down for interviews, but I always told them I was very happy with my current job. While the job had it’s challenges, it also had a lot of it’s own perks. Working from home & not having to commute was definitely one of those great perks.
However, Deseret Digital Media (DDM) is a great company that is growing quickly, and seemed like it could be a really great fit, so when asked to send in my resume I did. After several weeks, I was called back and went through a rigorous gauntlet of 13 interviews by phone and in-person. I’ll later write a post on what a wonderful job they did throughout the interview process, and they really tested my technical knowledge and management experience.
The more I went through the interviews, the more I personally found out what DDM is like, and the more I realized that it would be a good fit for me. So I was excited when they extended an offer, and I accepted.
I will miss Dating DNA, and I wish them the best of luck and success. I would like nothing better than for the company to explode with success and revenues, with everyone becoming millionaires, even if I had left before that happened.
I’ll still be helping Dating DNA with their transition to their new guy. I’ve known him for awhile, and I couldn’t think of a better person to step in and fill my role.
I promise to keep everyone up-to-date on how things go with Deseret Digital Media, but I am very excited and have the highest hopes of it being a great experience. They have a lot of very talented, smart, and great people working there, and I’m humbled and honored they’ve extended the opportunity to me to join their team.
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Congrats Justin! Though don’t expect the jokes about going to work for a company that owns a newspaper to stop
Congrats Justin! That will be cool!
[...] recently changed jobs to be a Director for one of those for-profit companies, the Deseret News. I had other opportunities, probably which would have paid better, but I choose [...]