Bot evangelist Chris Messina leaves Uber

Uber developer experience lead Chris Messina announced Friday that he has left the ride-sharing company.

Messina is known as the creator of the hashtag and for accurately predicting that 2016 would be the year of conversational commerce.

While at Uber, Messina was a champion of chatbots and the Uber developer platform to promote Uber API integrations.

He also spoke at tech gatherings like MobileBeat, the IBM Watson developer conference, and, recently, at the Slush conference for startups in northern Europe.

Today you can get an Uber ride with Alexa, Google Assistant, and Facebook Messenger.

“Entering 2017, I’m hopeful — even with all the sh*t going on in the world and with the American political climate,” Messina said in a Medium post Friday. “There’s no shortage of good work to be done, and so what’s next for me is to take a beat and reflect on the next, best, most satisfying and most impactful thing I can do with my life.”

In addition to work on bots at Uber, Messina is a big supporter of the burgeoning bot ecosystem.

He is one of 10 moderators chosen by members of the Bots Facebook group, a community of more than 20,000 developers, investors, and startups interested in bots. Other moderators include leaders from Slack, Chatfuel, as well as various bot startup founders.

Messina is also prolific on Product Hunt. Being recommended or hunted by Messina on Product Hunt is a badge of honor among bot startups trying to break through the noise and get discovered.

Want to stay up to date with the latest from Messina? Chat with MessinaBot, his Facebook Messenger bot, which made its debut last summer. MessinaBot was made by Esther Crawford and her company Olabot.