Last week I officially announced that I am leaving Trulia at the end of March after 4-1/2 incredible years to start another internet company.

I am incredibly proud of all that we accomplished during my tenure at Trulia.  Most notably, we grew the team from five to over 100 ridiculously smart and talented people, raised over $33M from prominent Valley angels like Ron Conway and leading venture capital firms like Sequioa Capital and Accel Partners.  We grew our audience from virtually zero to almost seven million unique monthly users becoming one of the top three real estate sites on Comscore in the process. Most importantly (to the shareholders) we acquired hundreds of paying enterprise clients from Bank of America to Home Depot along with thousands of paying real estate broker and agent customers.  The current team has both the ambition and the wherewithal to become #1 in its space and build a billion dollar brand in the process.

Being at a fast growing internet startup with so many incredibly smart, driven people for 4-1/2 years is like spending decades at a large company in terms of what you learn.  One of the reasons I started StarupAlley was to start sharing all that knowledge with the community and any entrepreneur who wanted to learn from my experiences.  But as hard as it is, I wanted to leave my fellow Trulians with just one important lesson I learned during my time at Trulia that would last them a lifetime. That lesson is applicable to anyone that has lofty ambitions and wants to change the world, so I included my email to my fellow Trulians below:

I will be leaving Trulia at the end of March after 4-1/2 incredible years. When thinking what I wanted to leave you with there is just so much to chose from, so many great memories, so many stories and so much video footage I will never be able to show you thanks to the cease-and-desist letter Daniel and Rebecca sent me on Saturday.

But seriously, I wanted to leave you all with some profound wisdom or at least a golden nugget. In thinking about what that would be I couldn’t help but think about the last time I had a chance to work so intensely with an amazing group of smart, diverse people for such a long period of time, which for me was business school. The more I thought about it the more I thought it was the perfect analogy because I absolutely went to school on Trulia every day I was here.

Anybody that has gone to business school, or has thought about it, knows that half the reason you pay $50k per year is what you learn and the other half is the people you meet.  Like a startup you spend countless hours, many all-nighters and even more weekends in close quarters with your classmates and you all (ok, many) become very close friends. Thanks to my business school experience I have 35+ of my closest friends and a place to stay pretty much anywhere in the world I go, as 50% of my class was international.

Well, at Trulia I felt like I got MBA every single year I was here.  Not only did we cram just as much learning into every year, but also we added 35+ new incredibly smart, passionate people each year that spent countless, days, nights and weekends together tirelessly building this company.  I look around at Trulia and I see 100 really good friends from all over the world. When I think about what I take away from my time here its something like 25% what I did, 25% the friends I made, 25% what I learned and the memories I made with those friends and 25% monetary. I say that to make that point that only a small fraction of the time I spent here was about a paycheck.

I am so excited for all of you that I leave behind.  As Trulia goes from 100 to 300 people in the next few years you too will learn and grow 10 times over!

So if there is a golden nugget I can leave you with it’s to take advantage of the opportunities you have here to get your MBA every year for the next 5++ years at Trulia.  Take a look around you everyday, because you have the privilege of working with an incredible assemble of smart, ambitious people that are going to change the world. We are a relatively young company in terms of average age, so for most of you the people you work with over the next few years at Trulia are going to shape the way you think and determine a lot of your future opportunities.  So spend as much time as you can getting to know as many of your fellow Trulians as possible.  And I don’t mean just the people you already work with everyday, but all those other people you don’t. Come in a little early in the morning and have coffee with them, go to lunch with them, have a beer in the kitchen at the end of the day with whomever is standing around.  You are a much larger part of each other’s future than you can possible imagine right now.

Finally, I hope you will always consider me a friend and resource and never hesitate to reach out to me for anything.   My business card might change, but I leave a big piece of my heart and soul at Trulia and will always bleed green.  Thank you all for 4-1/2 incredible years.

Your friend and biggest fan,

Sean