About Me

My name is Joel York and this is my blog. I’ve been making and marketing B2B software for the better part of the last 20 years for a wide range of companies and products including SaaS, enterprise and desktop across an even wider range of industry sectors (marketing, financial services, supply chain, security, business intelligence, etc.). My professional passion is all things Internet, and this blog is largely an outlet for expression in this area.  If you’d like to see the rest of the professional story, you can read my LinkedIn or Crunchbase profile: Joel York on LinkedIn or Joel York on Crunchbase.

The title of this blog, Chaotic Flow, is a double entendre (if it wasn’t as obvious as I had hoped) referring both to the messy and rapidly changing nature of this business as well as the sometimes messy and rapidly changing nature of my thoughts about it. I often use Chaotic Flow as a way of clarifying my own ideas as I work through specific business challenges–blogging my way to a solution per se. As such, most of what you read here is based directly on my own personal experiences as a SaaS executive.

With the business stuff out of the way, I’ll use the remainder of this space to tell you a little about myself personally. If you haven’t guessed already, I’m a scientist and technologist at heart. I studied physics at Caltech and Cornell, at the time thinking I was going to be a theoretician…so much for that. However, I did permanently ingrain a strong scientific bent to my approach to virtually everything in life, both professional and personal (to my wife’s eternal frustration…or to put it in the words of my sister-in-law: “Joel, you have a theory about how to sh*t.”).

I am lucky to have been married for more than 20 years to my wife Christy who is a creative, intelligent and beautiful woman that I surely don’t deserve (and who has no problem telling me as much). Seen here with one of several insufferably cute dogs we have had. More dog pictures here for the cute dog lovers. In addition to her day job as an RN, she has an MFA in painting, so she also paints and creates really cool pottery.

We currently live in San Francisco, having taken the scenic route to Silicon Valley via Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City. We love to travel, which is good because my work has entailed quite a lot of it. Our personal favorites so far being India, Turkey and Japan (no offense intended if you are from a country other than these…I grew up in Texas, which unfortunately is not my personal favorite state either). If you want to know more, you’ll have to get to know me in person. So, feel free to contact me.