Starting new chapters in life is always bittersweet, filled with excitement for the future and yet sadness for the people left behind.

When I started at MTV Networks, I was given a a difficult task; I was tasked with creating a social strategy from scratch that could connect our sites together, change our relationship with our audience by giving more control over how our media is shared and consumed, and build a platform that could increase engagement and power new experiences and programming. From those goals, FLUX was born – an innovative social networking and distribution platform. I’m proud to be able to leave MTVN with the ability to say that we accomplished all of our goals – we built and integrated a global platform that is now serving millions of unique visitors and page views, including over 12M registered users, over 7,000 publisher sites from across the web, and over 50 of Viacom’s major sites, including powering all of the social interactions on sites big and small – from MTV.com, VH1.com, ComedyCentral.com to Jokes.comJackAssWorld.com and ColbertNation.com, not to mention many others. Our vision for a social content distribution network has become a reality as users organically navigate their way through our sites, discover new content and communities, and engage more deeply than ever. And all of this we somehow accomplished in under two years. The road was definitely filled with pot holes along the way, and though FLUX hasn’t yet been able to achieve everything we set out to, I will always be proud of the accomplishments we made and the team I’m leaving behind.

What we realized when we started to build FLUX were two major facts: people weren’t really consuming content in Facebook (at least not premium content – certainly there are a lot of UGC photos consumed in-site), and people wanted to have deeper experiences directly aligned with their passions and other people who shared those passions. Our view was not of a centralized web world where major central hubs control the experiences, but of a fragmented and distributed world where you can bring your identity with you and share it across your communities and passion points, with the extra work required with something like OpenID, and without being forced to have all of your experiences in someone else’s walled garden, like Facebook. Of course, this all pre-dates Facebook Connect.

Much has changed in two years. This idea of fragmentation has taken a strong foothold, and the social networked walled gardens continue to crumble, just as the portal walled gardens crumbled before them. But the basic needs of any content creator haven’t changed – how do you get your content discovered by the most people, build a brand, and monetize? I’m sure I’ll continue working on these issues for many years to come.

I want to thank everyone who helped and supported us along the way, and most especially thank my team who showed more passion, dedication, and talent than I could have ever asked for. Without their hard work we could never have accomplished anything. I want to especially single out Jin Kang and Brian Wong – you have continually been an inspiration to me and I’m certain that in your hands Flux will be well taken care of.

And stay tuned… I’ll let everyone know soon what’s to come in my next chapter.