5/28/2023 0 Comments Backblaze raises personal backup![]() ![]() ![]() With five profitable years in business, we felt that our culture was firmly established and that it might be possible to find a partner that would trust us and not feel the need to control the company.Įven with these drivers, if we really were going to go down this path, it had to be with the right partner one that would be entrepreneur-friendly and would want to help, rather than control, the company. Our significant others are really supportive, but got tired of eating instant ramen somewhere around 2010. Funding would allow us to hire a little bit ahead of cash flow to make sure we get the best and the brightest on board to grow the company.Īfter going without salaries in the beginning it would be nice to get back some of that forgone salary from those early lean years. At times we felt someone was critical but we had to wait to hire them. This resulted in a healthy amount of rigor in determining whether a new position was really necessary. ![]() All too often I still hear, “My drive crashed and I lost everything I wish I’d heard of Backblaze earlier.” We liked the idea of being able to spread the message of backup faster.īootstrapping required us to hire people after we had the cash flow to fund their salaries. However, with 90% of people still not backing up their data, we have a long way to go. We have been growing about 100% year-over-year primarily through word-of-mouth. There were certainly a number of companies interested in giving us funding, but we continually decided it was better for us to go without.Ībout six months ago we had one of these discussions and for the first time said, “Hmm, it might be an interesting time to raise funding.” There were several reasons why we decided it may finally be the right time: While we chose not to raise funding to start Backblaze, we decided we would re-evaluate our decision to bootstrap every six months to make sure this was still the right path. However, we were committed to helping people backup data, were innovative about reducing the cost of storage, went without salaries for a while, pinched pennies where possible, and found our way through the wormhole to a fast-growing and profitable company a couple of years ago. It turns out that it is incredibly capital intensive to build 40 petabytes of storage, even using our cost-efficient cloud storage. Without funding, there were certainly some lean years for us in the beginning! In fact, an online backup service may have been the craziest business to bootstrap. Typically companies grow while losing money and raise VC funding as an operational requirement. What that looked like was five people committing to a year without salary and putting some of our own money into the business. We also didn’t want to give away control and a large part of the company. We were worried funding would influence the direction of our product and the culture of the company. When we originally started Backblaze, we wanted to focus on building the business-not on raising funding. Backblaze is already profitable and growing quite quickly, so you may ask, “Why take funding now?” It’s a good question, so let’s start at the beginning… Backblaze at the Beginning: Bootstrapping I wanted to spend a few minutes taking you through the process of how we got here. Oh, and it’s pretty fantastic for us too. This is awesome news for our customers who have come to rely on our service and for the millions of people who need an online backup service like ours. I’m excited to announce that today we have a new partner, TMT Investments, and some extra cash to help us achieve that goal! We started our online backup service five years ago, determined to help people never lose data again. ![]()
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