Wallaby's First Open House

This past Friday night we had our first open house for Wallaby Financial at our new office in Old Town Pasadena.  I think it was a great success with more than 50 attendees: investors, advisors, friends, potential future employees and business partners showing up to support us.

We moved in to our offices on September 17th, so it’s been just less than one month and it has been absolutely transformative to be in a real office.  The work in setting up an office is way bigger than I had expected and we’re not done yet (still waiting on our security system and telephones!).  However, with a last-minute IKEA order and a late night of furniture building we managed to pull together something really nice.

I’d share some photos, but it seems that the one thing we forgot was to take photos of the event!

In the past four weeks we went from an empty space to one with desks, a couch, a kitchen area, cabling, totally awesome glass whiteboards and I think some real personality.  Since September 1st, we’ve hired our first full time employee, brought on a marketing contractor and hired an intern.  By having a desk away from home, a dedicated filing cabinet and a monitor for my laptop my productivity has gone way up.  (I’m sure the Diet Coke, red vines and jelly beans have helped.)

Talking to the people who showed up started me thinking about the change from January, when I first left AT&T Interactive to focus on Wallaby.  In some ways, there is as much uncertainty now as there was before, but in other ways I have learned so much and the product has already come so far, that I can’t believe it’s only been 10 months.

So, I want to say “thank you.”  Thank you to my co-founder Todd, for his wonderful catering skills. Thank you to Blake, our lead engineer, for helping out, managing the beer and sticking around to clean thing up. Thank you to Peter, our marketing lead, for the great food he brought and for cleaning up as well.

Thank you to everyone who attended and has supported Wallaby and me in one way or another in the past year.

And a special thanks to Amara, for the amazing churros :)