A Rebel Packs It In
Vancouver's best known rebel entrepreneur, Dick Hardt, is decamping from his downtown digs for Seattle where he will take a job with .... wait for it ... Microsoft.
Hardt is serial entrepreneur with a string of companies behind him, most recently Sxip Identity, was well known among investors, entrepreneurs and software developers in the city's growing technology cluster. But Sxip never really took off, and a battle with investors over the past year has left him with a bitter taste regarding the future of technology in this province.
Hardt loved BC, and remained here although other friends had left for the States long before him. Most notable among them was Stewart Butterfield, who with partner Katerina Fake, formed the first picture sharing social networking app, Flickr. Investors here wouldn't give the pair the time of day, but Hardt did, providing some seed money and advising them to go to California where their innovative thinking would be more well received. It was, and the pair sold Flickr to Yahoo for a reported $35 million..
Now it seems Hardt is following his own advice. In his blog, Identity 2.0, he announced that he's joining what in many in his circle have always been as the Evil Empire, a concept to which Hardt never really subscribed. Hardt will join the monster software company at a senior level with the title Partner Architect, and will continue working on Open Source and online identity management in a much better financed and more adventurous setting than he could ever find in Vancouver.
Hardt was always an independent thinker, an often combative rebel who led the technology community but at the same time spent many years fighting with it. He insists that it was that very independent thinking that caused Microsoft to recruit him.
But Vancouver can be a small and cloistered place, and one has to wonder if maybe Hardt finally tired of brawling with the powers that rule the technology scene here.
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