After 7.5 years at Verily, I’m taking a sabbatical. Like prior breaks in my career, I expect this to be a time of experimentation and learning. I’ll sharpen my sense of what I want to be when I grow up, and figure out the next steps to get there.

I want to thank my friends and colleagues at Verily and our partners. You offered me the privilege of working with and learning from outstanding people every day. That’s the thing I need most to do great work and enjoy it. Some specific thanks are below, but there were so many great people over so many years that I can’t thank you all by name.

I am especially proud of the work we did on Verily Workbench. In the 6 years I was part of that team, we grew Workbench from a weird side project to the healthiest business at Verily. This happened in partnership with great customers including the NIH’s All of Us Research Program and others across industry, academia, and government. I hope you’ll all stay in touch and let me know if I can be of help, you want to brainstorm, or just to catch up.

What’s next I’ve started my sabbatical with some time to relax and travel with family. In the coming weeks, I’ll shift my attention to exploring new work. I have always been excited about startups and feel that again now, as advancements in AI create some rare opportunities for built-from-scratch businesses to outperform established competitors. I’m also deeply familiar with the challenges of scaling AI and cloud usage across the world’s most ambitious biomedical research endeavors and organizations, and interested in staying connected to science and medicine.

Though there are many challenges in front of us individually and communally, I am optimistic. I’m optimistic that (1) incredible discoveries will continue to bring huge opportunities and (2) good design and engineering can make those work for humanity. If you think in a similar way, reach out – I’m happy to talk.

Special thanks to my colleagues at Verily over the years. David Glazer for endless intelligence, wisdom, and grit as Workbench’s founding leader; Sean Horgan as an outstanding product leader, mentor, and friend; Gregory Jordan, Navid Zolghadr, and Harris Mendell as some of my favorite engineering partners ever; and Moira Dillon and Alessandro Culotti as the talented and hardworking PMs that were my closest partners in the trenches. I also want to thank Melissa Basford and Paul Harris, who were great partners along with many others at Vanderbilt and NIH in the All of Us Research Program. It was a privilege to work with you, and too many more wonderful colleagues to list, over the past few years.

Also posted on LinkedIn.