September 29, 2025 marked my last day at Splunk (now Cisco). After 8 rewarding years of learning, growing, friendships, and problem solving, I decided that it was the right time to leave and pursue the next chapter of my life.

Life at Splunk

I joined Splunk in September of 2017 as a Senior Software Engineer on the Business Value Consulting, or “BVC” (now SVP) team. I had followed a co-worker from my previous job to the company, and it immediately felt like a bad decision. Not because the company was a bad place to work, or because the team was bad - it was primarily because I had always wanted to start my own business, and I felt like accepting this cushy job would ultimately make it difficult to leave and pursue what I really wanted to do. Seeing as I spent eight years at Splunk, I think it’s safe to say that fear became a reality.

But, to my surprise, Spunk turned out to be a great place to work, and ultimately turned out to be something I’m happy I stuck with, and don’t regret even a little. Not only did Splunk put me and my family in the financial position to allow a bit of freedom (more on this in a minute), but the team we built fostered some of the best friendships I’ve had at a job, and we did a lot of fun and challenging work along the way, while still managing to have a great time in the process.

Work-life balance was fantastic. We were always going to fun new places for lunch (shoutout to the #WFLT Slack channel!), and generally had all the freedom to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. It was a blast…until things began changing.

End of the Line for the Fun Train

Around November 2021, Splunk’s board of directors pushed out Doug Merritt as CEO, and brought in Gary Steele. By 2023, the CFO (Jason Child) had also left, and was replaced by Brian Roberts. This is basically when it was clear that the ride was over.

Being a for-profit, publictly traded company, the board (and shareholders alike) weren’t satisfied with the growth had by Splunk stock (SPLK) since its IPO in 2012. Basically, one needn’t look too far to find another tech company that outperformed SPLK over any time period. Which, in their defense, is a reasonable thing be unsatisfied with.

The new CEO and CFO went down the path of restructuring the company to maximize shareholder value. That meant changes to equity packages, eliminating unnecessary spend, and, above all else, layoffs.

Once the layoffs began, it became clear what was really happening - The board was looking for an exit.

There were already a handful of rumors that Splunk was looking to be acquired, all of which we were assured were false by leadership (lol at the employees who believe what execs say).

By September 2023, the rumors became reality, and Cisco officially announced it’s intent to acquire Splunk and merge employees into the Cisco world.

It was at this time that the worst of the layoffs began - and all but three developers from my team were let go. These were high-performing, smart people on a team that quite literally quantified our value at roughly 20x our cost (literally, we had a Splunk dashboard directly linking revenue back to our team). To put it lightly, the layoffs made zero sense to me, and were clearly initiated at a level with zero insight into what our team did. Alas, the employer-employee relationship is a business one, and this is how the game works.

Once our friends left and the team shrunk to just a few from 9-10, morale began to shift rapidly. This basically reached a limit when we were asked to fill the “empty roles” we had just lost with near-shore remote hires in Costa Rica.

The three of us remaining were tasked with interviewing the replacement developers for the friends we just saw picked off one-by-one around us. To put it lightly - it fucking sucked. Nothing against the new developers, either. They were all fun and smart people to work with - it just wasn’t the same. And for roughly the next year, we just transactionally tackled responsibilities, but the fun was gone.

At this point, everyone was fed up with the decisions trickling down from above, and I was lucky enough to just be starting my parental leave for our new baby, and was off of work from September 2024 through February 2025. I had spent about a year after the announcement in a low-morale environment, and had just about had enough. The baby couldn’t have come at a more needed time.

Returning After Parental Leave

Taking five months off of work (fully paid) gave me a perspective shift that couldn’t be undone. I couldn’t unsee what I had seen, and it was clear that I didn’t want to work at this job anymore.

From February 2025 to September 2025, I leveraged my nights and weekends planning my exit - crunching the numbers and checking all the boxes I could think of to free myself from a situation that was burning me out.

And by September 2025, it was clear that we could afford to allow me to disconnect from work for a while and focus on what I’ve always wanted to do - start my own company.

Docuview

Those who know me know that technically this isn’t my first company. I started Electriq Power (IPO in 2023) with my friends back in 2016, but due to many reasons, that never played out the way I wanted, and was an utter disappointment.

This time around, I’m doing it my way - because I can.

Docuview is a SaaS platform for real estate agents to manage their listings. It leverages AI (new hotness!), and gives agents everything they need in a single place to manage their active listings.

But, more importantly, Docuview is private, fully bootstrapped, and 100% owned by myself. That means we don’t have a board, investors, or anyone to pressure us into doing things we don’t want to do. And this is where the true value of this business is for me - freedom.

The freedom to do what I want, when I want, is more valuable to me than most people. Yes, everyone would love to do whatever they want, whenever they want - don’t get me wrong. But, most people are also capable of being fully happy while being employees and just doing what they’re told. And that’s great.

I, on the other hand, have ALWAYS struggled with authority and loss of autonomy. When I’m told to “stay in my lane,” it just makes me want to veer more. That’s always how I’ve been.

So, the solution to not being good at staying in a single lane? Own the entire damn thing. Now I can bounce around to tasks that I find most interesting at any moment without being scrutinized or repeatedly reminded about KPRs and priorities and all those bullshit metrics that are made up anyways.

So the goal now is to just have fun with it. Solve problems, create value, grow, improve, etc. No major pressure, but realistically this is still a business and I do eventually need to make some money. But for now, that’s a problem for tomorrow. Today, I’m just relieved to be working on something of which I have full control, and nobody can tell me otherwise. Not gonna lie, it feels great.

This is what I’ve always wanted to do, but it never quite worked out in the past because I couldn’t afford to do it. So, if I didn’t stick it out for those eight years at Splunk, this wouldn’t be possible. So, thanks, past me, for sticking it out and not quitting at the beginning. Now we can finally do what we’ve always wanted! 😎