“Anxious, excited, bittersweet, sentimental, stressed, hopeful.” If someone drew up a word map for feelings that come to mind during a big move, these would probably loom large. As the team was furiously dismantling and putting away two years of history into an assortment of boxes and storage bins, I felt like I was vicariously living through something tantamount to young parents getting their once-toddler ready for their first day of elementary school.

I had just joined the company two days prior, so it was an interesting way to kick off the first week on a job, to say the least. On one hand, I was thrilled to be helping to write the first pages in the team’s next chapter. Moves of these sorts are like giant reset buttons; out with the old and in with the new, as it were.

A blank canvas. A chance to reorganize, to rethink priorities, to come up with new systems, to finally get rid of that gizmo in the bottom drawer that someone kept but never ended up using. Certainly in a physical sense, for an overflowing lab space at a young hardware company deep in iterative design and product development. But on the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing out on some shared nostalgia.

I doubt I’d have felt that way about a 30-year old firm with substantially more history and battle scars. It was the fact that so much of Fourier’s journey had been so recent, that most of the team were still laughing about snafus from two years ago as if it was just yesterday. “Damn, maybe I could’ve been around for that,” I thought to myself as I precariously took apart one of the team’s earliest versions of a test station.

The very next day, as we were about done with packing and ready to start loading things into trucks, I found myself sitting in a circle with the team, scribbling short responses onto Post-It notes. Siva felt it was important for the team to take a moment to decompress, to reminisce about the adventures they’d had in the office they were leaving behind, and to ponder the future. He had asked us what our biggest hopes and concerns would be for the Fourier’s significantly-larger new home in Mountain View.

Among my favorite responses were (1) finally having enough power; (2) having trouble finding people in the building; (3) equipment getting damaged during the move that sets back our commercial pilots; and (4) picnic tables for team lunches. It wasn’t that these were particularly surprising or outlandish, but precisely the sheer ‘ordinary-ness’ that struck me. For all of Fourier’s grand ambitions in tackling big engineering problems, at its heart was a small group of people who were cautiously optimistic about change and holding onto the familiar intimacy of being around each other. Returning to the example of young parents bracing for their kid’s first day at school, it felt relatable and reassuring to me as the newcomer in the room.

As it turned out, the move went surprisingly smoothly, and we’re now in the process of settling into our new location! The team has big plans for the huge new lab space, and we’re taking great care to design organizational systems that will set us up well for our transition towards commercial pilots, and eventually scalable manufacturing. Some of it we’re learning from our more experienced team members, but much of it is the unabashed, scrappy improvisation that I was promised when I decided to join an early-stage startup.

I’ve been asked on multiple occasions now by different members of the team how my first month at Fourier has been, to which I’ve said, “I wasn’t expecting to be packing boxes and giving the CEO suggestions in my first week, but I probably wouldn’t have had it any other way.”