Three and half years ago I left Microsoft to join Telligent. At the time, Microsoft didn’t seem interested in being a player in the social software space, and I decided—to get the opportunity I was looking for–it was time to leave. Telligent represented a tremendous opportunity to be part of the leadership for a growing company that has a truly rare opportunity to be very disruptive, dominate the social software space, and make a real difference in people’s lives. It’s incredibly difficult to find a combination as cool as that in the software industry, and that remains true today.
In my time at Telligent, I’ve had a chance to ship 1.0 versions of the Telligent Enterprise, Analytics and Mobile products and continue to grow the Telligent Evolution platform with the addition of wiki, social profiles, and QnA applications. Along the way, I’ve also had an opportunity to implement developer quality standards and introduce Telligent to the Program Management and Quality Assurance disciplines.
I’m grateful to Rob, Patrick and everyone else at Telligent for the opportunities I’ve been given and the wonderful people I’ve had the chance to meet and work with here. I’m so incredibly proud of the work we’ve all accomplished as a team to get Telligent into the position it’s in today. From the outside, I’ll be rooting for everyone’s continued successes.
My co-workers, friends and the opportunity have made this an incredibly hard decision for me, but I’m making the choice to join the entrepreneurial scene and develop some projects and business ideas I’ve been putting off for a while. In the end, it was a decision that really came down to a lot of personal timing and stars aligning. I’ll miss everyone almost as much as I’ll miss ordering Texas meat by the pound. 
If you want to know what I’m doing next, you’ll have to follow my blog or twitter feed. My personal email address is jledgard@gmail.com and my business address after Friday is josh@evolvingwe.com. This will get interesting.