Are we still a startup?

We’ve come a long way in just a few years. As one of the early employees, and unofficial company historian, I’m often asked about how things used to be. I’m also often asked about what has changed, what’s still the same, what do I think is going to happen in the future, and lots of other questions. One of the questions that I didn’t have an answer to recently was “Are we still a startup?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, but today, something happened that made the answer crystal clear to me. I’ll get to the answer, but first, a little background…

At Eagle Eye Networks we have a team of people who are dedicated to building and maintaining our servers. In fact, we have custom chassis designed specifically for our needs, which are to meet the demands of reliably storing and delivering petabytes of video. Today we received another shipment of chassis, ready to be built into servers to hold video. Once completed, these machines will be shipped to one of our seven data centers around the world.

It’s amazing to me, having seen things grow from when we had no customers, to where we’re receiving pallets full of hard drives and containers full of server chassis. I remember the first major shipment of equipment that we had – it filled the office. We had to rent a U-haul and a storage unit to hold it all, and the entire company, which was probably 10 employees or so, helped load the U-haul. Now we get those shipments on a regular basis and we’re adding employees all the time.

These are all signs of significant progress, and I’m obviously happy with how far we’ve come, but does it mean that we’ve graduated from being a startup to being whatever comes next? While I’m at it, how does any company measure when they’ve “made it?” I’m sure it’s different for each industry, each company, or even for each person in the company. However, I realized for me, at least for right now, one measurement that I use, and it can be summed up in the following picture. Today, when we received a new shipment of equipment, members of the sales team helped unload the container. In my book, that means we’re still a startup.

— Hans Kahler    April, 2017

Photo credit Joey Tallieu