Three months after he stepped down as CEO, Ticketleap founder Chris Stanchak is leaving Philadelphia for San Diego, he wrote on his blog this week.
He’s leaving for both professional and personal reasons: he’ll be working on bootstrapping his wife’s new startup Bidbash, which he said aims to be a better local marketplace than Craigslist, and he and his wife want to be closer to his wife’s family, who lives on the West Coast.
Stanchak’s departure feels different from other Philly brain drain stories Technically Philly has covered in the past. For one, he’s not leaving because he’s unhappy with the local market.
“I feel like I’m leaving Philly just when it’s finally what I’ve always hoped it would be,” wrote Stanchak, who has said that it was “a bit lonely” in the early Ticketleap days, when there was little movement in the local tech scene.
Unlike other entrepreneurs that left Philly to build a business elsewhere, Stanchak is leaving after spending a decade building a startup that now has a staff of nearly 30. He might be leaving the area but his company — and those jobs — remain.
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