A Farewell

A little over 12 years ago to the day, I took the single greatest leap of faith in my working life: I quit my comfortable job at Syracuse University doing search and NLP research engineering to join up with Marc, Yonik, and Erik to begin the journey that is Lucidworks. Today that journey is nearing an end as I’m announcing my departure from Lucidworks as a full-time employee and beginning a new journey as shareholder and cheerleader.

Back in 2007, the four of us founders set out to build a business around the large and vibrant Apache Solr community using an open-source 1.0 business model. Over the years, through countless ups and downs, that vision has evolved and expanded in ways we never imagined. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built at Lucidworks and am also excited for where the team is headed, even if it is without me in a day-to-day role. 

The company is in as good a place as it has ever been with significant support from the investment community, a strong employee base, and growing adoption across our two main use cases of search for digital workplace and digital commerce. More importantly, the company has a vision for, and traction in, taking on not just the search and analytics market, but the next generation of intelligent applications via Fusion’s key constituents: Server, AI, and App Studio.

A lot can be read into a founder leaving, but for me the best explanation is also the simplest and most accurate one: it’s time to do something new. It is, of course, a bittersweet moment that I am still wrapping my head, and heart, around. While I am excited for what lies ahead, there are so many people I will miss here and so many that I want to thank for their time and effort in helping us build Lucidworks into something special.  

As much as I want to thank all the employees who have joined in on the journey, I too want to thank our customers and partners through the years. It has been an incredible honor to be able to serve you all over the past 12 years. Many of you staked a small part of your career on a tiny startup battling some well-entrenched giants and I am forever grateful that you did. If you are at Activate next week, please be sure to grab a moment so I can thank you in person! 

I am equally grateful for those of you who showed us we could dream bigger by using our products in ways that even we weren’t quite ready to understand. You have taught me more than I ever thought was possible with search.  

To both our customers and our employees, I am confident Lucidworks is well-positioned to serve all of you going forward and I look forward to seeing what’s next for the company, Solr, and search!

Happy Searching,

Grant