Closing a Chapter 

A couple of weeks back, the first company I ever worked at was seemingly sold off for spare parts.

It's not terribly surprising. I'm not really sure what Sensable has been doing for the past few years. The endeavor into dental seemed like it was maybe working, but it was hard to say because the company has changed focus 8 times since I left nine years ago.

Shit, has it been nine years?

From a pure technology perspective, Sensable was an awesome company and an awesome place to work. Cool technology, incredibly smart people (legitimately, some of the smartest people I've ever met in my life), a large enough niche to be self-sustaining (academia), with a couple of other niches to keep the lights on. Not being a business expert, nor privy to the financials, I'd guess the big issue is that when you take $40ish million in funding, you have to find a way to pay that back.

Unfortunately, the revenues never got there, and the leadership, in later years, seemed to be more interested in digging a deeper hole than finding an exit. (I'm just speculating; I don't actually know anything.)

In early April, the Sensable I knew ceased to exist. I'm sort of ok with that. I'm not sure if I know anybody who still works there—everyone has gone onto other things, often bigger and better—nor do I have any clue what the company was really doing these days. In reality, I haven't been clued into Sensable for years.

So, given that, why does this pain me a little bit? It's the close of a chapter of my life. Even though I've been gone for nine years (again … shit, that makes me old), I still see folks from Sensable from time to time. There are still emails and occasional get togethers. These are people I root for, as they were, to a person, almost all really awesome.

But that thread that tied us together—which had frayed and grown bare but not broken—finally broke. And that makes me a little sad. But, I'll still keep up with the folks I worked with and watch as they do new, awesome things.

(If the second company I worked for disappeared off the face of the earth, I'm not sure I'd really care. In fact, I know I wouldn't. That place was sort of a cesspool. Actually, not sort of; it was a cesspool.)