My last day at Tabblo and Hewlett-Packard is in five weeks. It’s been almost five years since I joined Tabblo, and three and a half years since HP acquired us.

It’s been a really interesting experience. First, building a consumer web site in a startup environment, launching it, and encouraging its growth. Then steering the group within HP, a large complex environment, equally as chaotic as a startup, but along different dimensions.

HP allowed us to do deals we never would have on our own: a book editor for Disney, applications promoted on the Myspace front page, print buttons on AOL.com. It’s been fascinating to adapt our code to new applications, test the flexibility of our abstractions, and build new experiences at times faster than we did as a startup.

But the large company environment is not best for me. The challenges are becoming more organizational than technical. I’m ready for new problems. I’ll be freelancing, something I’ve never tried before. I already have a few really interesting possibilities lined up.

I’ll miss the people and work at Tabblo, but it’s time to go. On to the next.