Charlie Kindel, the founder of Amazon’s Alexa Smart Home unit left the company on Friday, writing in an email to colleagues that “the pace of the past 5 years has finally gotten to me and I simply need to catch my breath.” He added, “I was originally just going to take a temporary leave, but I like the idea of having total freedom of thought to decide what’s next in my life,” and that “By making a clean break from Amazon all options (including coming back to Amazon) are still on the table.”