If you follow me on Twitter, it’s probably no surprise from all my excited tweets over the last year and a half that starting my own consultancy has brought me much joy, pride and personal growth. I’ve worked in the nonprofit sector my entire career. I’ve been a Drupal geek for the last 5 years. My academic studies have been in organizational development. The opportunity to combine these interests to build an effective team of technologists to solve problems for communities working to make the world a better place has been, at the risk of sounding cheesy, ridiculously awesome. I consider myself blessed that I can make a sustainable living, working in a great city, serving people who make a difference.
One of my favorite aspects of starting ThinkShout has been the opportunity to work closely with Lev Tsypin of Level Online Strategy as a collaborator and lead engineer on a number of great projects. I’ve been following Lev’s work with progressive organizations and Drupal for the last four years. Lev is one of the best software engineers I’ve ever met. And in my admittedly biased opinion, he has few equals in terms of his pragmatic ability to leverage open source technologies to solve his client’s problems.
After sharing an office and over 2,000 hours of client work this last year, Lev and I have pulled the trigger, recently deciding to go into business together as equal partners in the re-branded, newly incorporated ThinkShout Inc.
I’d encourage you read Lev’s much more articulate description of the thinking behind this decision to join forces. As strong, opinionated entrepreneurs in the progressive sector - it was definitely a move that we discussed thoroughly (we have the beer tabs to prove it). But what it means for our current and future clients is increased capacity and a “deeper bench.” It will also equate to efficiency gains that will allow us to contribute back more code and tools to the Drupal and nonprofit technology community.
