This post has nothing to do with web performance… well kind of.
Starting a company is an adventure, with its highs and lows. It’s a real roller coaster, but no one told us that when we decided to leave our comfortable jobs at Google almost 5 years ago.
The highlights for me are always customer-related. Winning a new account, jumping on a call at 2 am to help a customer troubleshoot, getting a new Catchpoint release out, opening nodes and the excitement that goes along getting my hands on shiny new servers in some remote location — these are some of my favorite moments. I can still see Veronica writing code as if it’s poetry, I can hear Scott telling me back in September 2008, “Mehdi, I need 9 months to build our own Filesystem, a No-SQL/In Memory database and our own ETL!”. (You should have seen my face! can not we buy this? Best decision we ever made!). And then there was Drit always coming up with 20,000 ideas per second but at the same time making sure we stay focused and execute on what we said we would do back in 2008. Paul our CFO teaching me about Finance 101 (thank you for the free MBA Paul!)
The lows were always money-related, especially in the early days: making payroll, breaking into my own 401K, asking my co-founders to make sacrifices, and living on their savings for several years.
A startup is a team effort that extends way past the founders and early employees. Our families are the first ones to take the hit, dealing with our moods, our long working hours, and our weekends not going to the park with the kids. So to our families, near and far, thank you!
The other key constituents are our customers. Catchpoint would never have happened without them. I call them our “First Investors”. They literally took a gamble on us in April 2010 when I visited a few of them with our first beta release. They liked the vision, the direction, the team and experience. And then they fought hard to find some budget. Without them we wouldn’t be where we are today. And Customers will always be our number one Investors.
On March 12 we announced that Catchpoint secured an investment from Battery Ventures. It’s a huge milestone for us in our journey. We have been speaking with reporters and analysts across the country and wanted to share our thinking behind this important step with you as well.
- Why now? It’s about speed really. With the backing of Battery, we now have the expertise and the capital to help us press on the gas pedal. It’s also about performance, we want to continue to add great people to our team so we can keep innovating and stay ahead.
- Why them? Because Battery Ventures gets it! Because they showed a genuine interest. Because they did not ask us what our social plugin is or is our App can take pictures of cats to share it with 2 other folks on the planet, or if we should convert Catchpoint into an adserver!
It’s a journey, an amazing one that will continue to challenge us to learn about ourselves, push our limits, and work together under more stressful conditions. We are so appreciative of our Customers, our team, our families, our DoubleClick and Google alumni network, Advisors and now, our top-notch investors who will help us carry our vision forward.
Thank you! We would not be here without all of you! Yes even you visiting this blog and caring about web performance & monitoring in general.
A million thanks!
Mehdi – Catchpoint