Hasmetrics CEO Adam
Hasmetrics CEO Adam Herscher

As employees at Microsoft, Amazon, and other big tech companies can attest, it’s not easy leaving a cushy corporate job and a fat paycheck to go launch a startup. The amount of risk involved, both financial and emotional, can sometimes be too much.

But for Microsoft veteran Adam Herscher, making that “leap” has turned out to be an excellent decision.

Herscher is the co-founder and CEO of Hasmetrics, a new Seattle startup that is creating customer experience management solutions that help developers and project managers more easily receive feedback — or, as Herscher puts it, “customer happiness software.”

The CEO wouldn’t say much else about the bootstrapped four-person company, but did note that he and co-founder Sean Andersen — also an ex-Microsoftie — came up with the idea after their experiences in Redmond.

hasmetrics111“The project managers and developers who would create and improve these products sat about as far from support — and thus our customers — as humanly possible,” Herscher explained. “If you asked ten developers on a product team what the most important things their customers were saying, or feeling, about their products were, you’d often get a hundred different answers. We knew this had to be a common problem and that there had to be a better way.”

Earlier this week, Herscher wrote a fantastic blog post about his decision to leave Microsoft that has garnered almost 500,000 views and more than 1,300 comments on LinkedIn.

“Over time though, I began to feel real differences between starting something on a team of hundreds, if not thousands of people within a big corporation, versus starting something where you personally pour your heart and soul into all that’s required to earn the business and trust of your first customers, employees, and investors/partners,” he wrote.

Herscher said he penned the piece partly as self-expression, but also to encourage others in the Seattle tech industry — particularly aspiring entrepreneurs who may be “stuck” at big companies — to think about what’s important in their life and consider all the options.

“Seattle has so many smart people, so many examples of successful tech startups that have furthered the world, and so many investors, journalists, and other members of the startup ecosystem working to make it successful,” he explained. “There’s an insane amount of opportunity and it’s all easy to miss from inside the walls of big company life.”

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