See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 41 How One Blog Post Generated Millions of Readers and 1,000+ Sign-ups.
Alex: Welcome Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of publicly listed Backblaze on NASDAQ blze, a cloud storage company known for making data storage simple and cost efficient at scale. And Gleb also founded and exited two companies previously. So this is a three-time exited founder and operating CEO. Welcome to the pod, Gleb. Excited to pick your brain? Well, it's been great catching up. I've always been, for many years, impressed with how you're one of the, CEOs that was always switched on, on how to build content, as kind of one of the foundational motions of growing your business. And so for our audience that's interested in, you know, how do CEOs think strategically about content as a source of revenue and growth? We'll come back to that in a second. But Gleb would be great to start with a story of why you, after two exits, where you sold the companies, you really were keen on going public with, Backblaze.
Gleb Budman: Sure. So, you know, it's. I will, I will tell you that when we started the Backblaze, it wasn't like at the beginning of it. We said we're taking this company public. You know, I'd love to be able to say we had that vision at the beginning, but we didn't. When we started the company, there were five of us. We quit our jobs. We started in the one-bedroom apartment of my co-founder and cto. And we said one thing we did decide at the beginning was that we weren't going to take venture funding to start. So, the prior two companies that we worked on were both venture funded from the beginning. and we made an explicit decision to not take venture funding to start the company this time around. And we said if you start with venture, first of all, everybody, that's on the founding team is very focused on how we raise funding instead of spending time focusing on how we build good product, how we find product, market fit, how do we find customers. You're out there pitching, pitching, pitching, pitching. So that was part of it. the other part of it was that if you're successful and you get investors on board now you've got people who you have pitched and convinced on a certain model of what the business is, and you may need to pivot at some point. And we've had an experience before where we pull pivoted, and the investors we had were not exactly the ideal fit for that pivot. and then the other thing is that if you start on day one, you've raised your funding, you've raised $10 million. Now you have $10 million sitting in a bank account. the decisions you make as a team, become in some ways optimized toward how do you raise the next round of funding, as opposed to thinking about how do you get a dollar from your next customer. So we had these perspectives and we said that I was, you've been bitten.
Alex: you've been bitten a little bit. You've had successes, but you had some, bitten. But you were ready for another run.
Gleb Budman: And we were ready for.
Alex: And it was the same. Same team, right? The team knew each other. You guys worked with each other before.
Gleb Budman: We did, yeah. So, you know, my, three of us actually worked on the first company that we did together back in 99, and then that company got acquired, by Excited Home. that company was Kendare. It got acquired by Excited Home. And we met the other two people at Excited Home. We worked together at Excited Home. When Excited Home went out of business, a, couple of people started a company called Mail Frontier. I joined up with them on that. we worked on that for about four years and sold it to Sonicwall. And then at Sonicwall, one, of my co-founders had quit. He had a friend who he did, tech support for, like many of us do, right? And his friend called up in a panic and was like, help, you’ve got to get me my data back. My computer crashed. And he was like, yeah, no problem. I'll get you a laptop. We'll get you set up. Where is your backup? And she starts pounding the table. And she's like, look, what I don't need now is a lecture. What I need is for you to get my stuff back. And he was always religious about, data backups. And he's like, if you don't have a backup, I can't help you. And so he and I started talking about it and saying, who doesn't back up their data? And so we started asking friends and family and co workers, and what we found was most people were not. And we were like, wait a minute.
Alex: Most people weren't like, You.
Gleb Budman: Most people were not like us. Yeah. It's like everybody's getting a laptop, every piece of data is going digital, and no one's backing up. Like, this is a disaster in the making. Right? And so we said, well, this is what year?
Alex: This is what year? Roughly what year did you guys start back, lace?
Gleb Budman: This was 2007, so we actually just
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Gleb Budman: celebrated our 19th year anniversary of Backlace.
Alex: Amazing.
Gleb Budman: All right. and so I know it's hard to imagine today of like, wait, you know, laptops. I mean, laptops have been around forever.
Alex: You must have been 10 years old when you did it. You look good, man.
Gleb Budman: Exactly. It's all the skin cream, you know?
Alex: Yeah.
Gleb Budman: but, you know, so we. We decided that the way we were going to start back, boys, we were going to quit our jobs, and we made a commitment to each other that we would spend one year working on Backblaze. We put a little bit of money in, and we would take no salary, and we would not talk to investors of any kind for one year. No PowerPoints, no pitching, no anything. And. And which, by the way, just to.
Alex: For our audience, like, you guys are perfect, perfect candidates, for investors.
Gleb Budman: Right.
Alex: They would love to back, you know, to egg two exits, you know, team that worked together before had exits before. So this is not a trivial commitment. Right. Like, it was not. Like, it was not the hardest thing for you to get money.
Gleb Budman: Yeah, it was. It would have been probably easier for us to go and raise one and two while it seems like, oh, yeah, these guys had two exits, and so they were flush with cash, so sure, they could not work for a year. It actually wasn't like that. the first company that, we sold, while the exit was good, excited Home went out of business. So most of us made very little, if anything, on that exit because we were locked up, for a while. And the second one, the exit, was just not that. Not that dramatic. So, it was still. I mean, committing to a year without salary was a lot of rice and beans and ramen. Right. but we kind of felt like by doing that we would get to focus on just building the company and building the culture and stuff. and we went for a year. And again, I think, like, with many entrepreneurs, if you look back and say, if I knew what I know now, we may never have done it. We may have never started it. Right. It's like, it's a, the smell
Alex: in that bathroom, one bedroom, was five of you eating rice, beans, and, thing must have been like, warning Sign that it's not going to be easy.
Gleb Budman: Yeah, exactly. I mean it was, it was, you know, because we thought, okay, a year in we'll be paying ourselves normal salaries and you know, we'll be, and it'll be fine. And it's like, you know, we worked for a year and then it was like, okay, we are nowhere near being able to pay ourselves salaries because we've, you know, like as the company's going, like now we have more expenses. And the thing with Backblaze that was different than the other two companies. The other two companies were pure software companies. Backblaze was an infrastructure company and so we actually had to buy physical gear. So the money went to, you know, paying for servers and stuff and not, not our salaries. And so a year in we actually had a conversation where one of our founders said I can't do this, I'm out. And became basically a contractor for us. And then a few months later we convinced them to kind of rejoin a fisherie. and then we all had a conversation a year in that said okay, wait a minute, we all committed to each other for a year but we're not able to pay salaries now. How do people feel about signing up for another half a year with no salary? And you know, it was like, I mean people had mortgages to pay. You know, it's like luckily at that point nobody had kids yet, but you know, it was still pretty lean. So we committed for another half a year with no salary. And then after that we started paying ourselves minimum wage which was all of a sudden like yay, we're paying ourselves something. You know, it was minimum wage, but we became legal employees for the first time in a year and a half. And then we did that for like nine months and then paid ourselves two times minimum wage for like another nine months. So, so it was a long slog of a lot of personal resources and commitment into it. but you were asking like, why go public? When we started the company, we drew on the board possible ways this company was going to go. ah, possible path number one, we're just going to be five guys sitting in a one bedroom apartment and we'll be running this company as a small company together for a long time. Possibility number two was just get acquired as an outcome. Possibility number three was going to grow and we'll raise money at some point and we'll go the more traditional venture path and maybe it'll get acquired. Possibly number five was will go Public. But it was like, the idea of it'll go public was like, I mean, sure, that's one of the paths that companies can take. It wasn't like that was the path. but somewhere around, maybe five years in or so, we started looking at and going, you know, we've been doing this for a while. We've got all these customers who love the product. We have employees who like working here. Like, we. We've been through the process of selling a company twice before, and in both of those cases, in one way or another, the company basically vaporized, Right?
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Gleb Budman: And, you know, as an entrepreneur, like, you know, you're doing it hopefully because you're like, this is an important problem. And I love the problem, and I love building, and I want to create, and I want this thing to matter and everything. And if you sell it, oftentimes it vaporizes. And so we had this idea at some point that started developing in our head of, like, if we want this to be around for a long, long time, hopefully forever, you know, taking it public is one way to at least help, ensure that that could happen.
Alex: And so what's been the biggest surprise on the journey, you know, once you've gone public? Right. It must have. You know, everybody thinks, and I've been in these. In this situation, where we did take the company public, and. And, you know, everybody got distracted a little bit was. Was that. And. And it helped a little bit was the customers, because, you know, now we are credible in public. And you know that. So in your rationale, right, there's a legacy you don't want. You know, the fact that you're giving all these millions of people and businesses peace of mind, you know, with your product, you don't want that to disappear. But, you know, what were the surprises that you wish you kind of had anticipated on the journey as a public company?
Gleb Budman: You know, I think in some ways it's. It. It may be obvious, but the level of communication needed for the street, for the investors, was almost, I guess, surprising in what? Both, how many times you need to kind of be saying the same story to make sure that people understand it, but also how that need changes. So I'll give you one example. So when we were going public, it was 20, 21, and every single investor conversation, every single analyst conversation, everybody asked us the same question, which was, hey, if you raise more money, what can you do to grow faster by taking and spending more money? Right? And that was all the conversations. And up through November of 2020, one when we went public, that was all the conversations. We went public in November of 2021. We did our first earnings call in February of 2022. Right. So just a couple months after that and the market had shifted and 100% of the conversations in February of 2022 were what can you do to stop spending money so that you can be free cash flow positive. Right? And it's like we're like, okay, the business is still the business. We're still going after the same customer, same use cases, same things, you know, like, but the market per of what was important shifted. And so you know, like how you adapt to that or not adapt, right, like, you know, or continue to like grow upstream and say no, this isn't what we're doing. you know, is something that like you have to be very cognizant of.
Alex: Another, another interesting challenge that I imagine you've thought, you know, and dealt more than most is like you were, you're relatively small vendor in the fish of the Amazons and the Microsofts and the Google kind of in the storage that they are offering, you know, and you've been navigating this David versus Goliath kind of battles for, for quite some time. How do you think about that and how has your, your, you know, you evolved as the market evolved in kind of finding, carving out your niches and succeeding there.
Gleb Budman: So when we started the company, we actually planned on using Amazon S3 as the underlying storage and being value added
Alex: on top of that.
Gleb Budman: Yeah, we were going to build all the software stack on top of that. But when we did the math we said well that's interesting. We're going to lose money on every single customer because of how much Amazon charges. And so then we ended up designing and building all of our own cloud storage infrastructure. And when we said we were going to go down that path, you know, people said oh that's stupid. Like you're never going to be able to do that. Amazon's got scale, they know low margin businesses. Like, you know, you can't possibly compete with them and you can't possibly compete with like EMC and NetApp and Dell and these big storage companies. And we're like, that may all be true, but a hard drive does not cost that much. And if you use first principles and you write software around everything else, then the math should work. And so we said like, either we're going to go out of business or we're going to make this work. Those are the only two choices. And so, but for the longest time. I mean, literally for years and years and years and years, people always said, but what if Amazon lowers prices? M. Right. And you know, the thing is like, we're
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Gleb Budman: 19 years into this and ah, it's still a question that comes up, right? But we're like, okay, we have been competing with Amazon for 19 years, right? And we have been growing and scaling. And the thing about it is that now it's actually all the AI workloads are making it for the first time where people are like, oh, I think I actually get why this is different. And it's been this really interesting moment for us, which, there's this whole technological replatforming where Microsoft basically owned the tech stacks. And now there are all these NEO clouds that have popped up. You know, companies like CoreWeave and Nebius and Lambda and a bunch of others. There's about 200 of these companies out there and you know, they are building out AI infrastructure in a way that is, you know, outside of the three hyperscalers and, and customers want to use those. And we, because we have this open cloud storage platform, we, we enable these NEO clouds both to offer their own storage, but also customers to use storage the way they want to use it. And so it's been this interesting moment where, people are starting to go, oh, I see why it's not just like, Amazon can lower prices and stuff, you're actually doing something that's different that they won't and can't do.
Alex: Took a while. It took a while for the, for the. But it's so interesting that you're enabling the disruptors effectively and you're the, selling the kind of, through your sophisticated technology, you're selling the picks and shovels in the AI infrastructure. Gold rush. It sounds like that's a, Is that a good way of thinking about the.
Gleb Budman: It's exactly right. Yeah, It's. I mean, the thing is, so like one of the use cases that we see on our platform is we have companies that come to us and say, I've, I'm building this AI model. I've licensed, you know, this massive amount of GPU availability at this one, you know, place. And it starts June 1st. And then they're like, I need to get all of my data together and get petabytes and petabytes and petabytes of data and assemble it, assemble it, assemble it. Once I have it, those GPUs are very expensive. I don't want them sitting idle. So I need to take all that data and I need to send it to the place where I'm going to do the model building and I need to do that as fast as I can. So I need to have a place where I can store a massive amount of data, cost efficiently and then be able to egress it really fast to the right place. Then if a month after that I sign a contract with a different location, for GPUs, I want to be able to send it there too. I can't do any of that on Amazon because it's going to cost me a boatload to store the data, but it's also going to cost me a ton to egress the data because they don't want to let your data go outside of their walls. we are becoming this kind of core storage, infrastructure layer for these AI companies, both the ones building the infrastructure as well as the ones using it.
Alex: And so when back to the investor communications. Right. Sounds like you have to repeat the same message in seven different ways, seven different times for it to stick. And then as the market shifts, the message shifts as well. What have you found that works best with investors that are familiar with your story and the ones that are kind of new and exploring and trying to understand how are you taking on all these giants.
Gleb Budman: So, so one thing I would say is that you know, and this is probably very similar for you know, like your customers who use relay too. Right. Which is the investors are much like customers in that, you know, you need awareness and then you need interest and then you need, you know, like you have to do the multi touch process and you have to communicate and you have to explain. Right. Like the whole process. So part of it is like we try to, you know, like find multiple places and paths to get our story out to them and make sure that the ones that seem like they're better fits are, you know, we can get in front of on a more regular basis. It's you know, an icp, right? An ideal customer profile. You have like an ideal investor profile. like we talked with investors early on who they only invest in companies that are Fortune 500 companies. There's no point talking to them because they're not going to invest in us until We're a Fortune 500 company. They just can't do it. No matter how much they love backways, they can't do it. So it's finding the ideal investors for whom we are a good fit and then making sure that we get our story in front of them. ah, consistency. So One of the things that has been interesting with being a public company and this is a rigor that you know, it's a muscle that we built more as a public company than we had as a private company is you have to think about like, hey, I've got this cool idea. But just because I have a cool idea, like it doesn't mean that
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Gleb Budman: we say okay and then that's it. Because you have to know that like if you're going to tell the investors there's this cool thing that we're doing m then next quarter and the quarter after and the quarter after they're going to go so how's it going? And you don't want to be saying every single quarter, oh, but that idea of oh, forget it, I've got a new cool idea. It's like you can't do the shiny object syndrome. You have to actually say this is a thing I have some belief on, this is the trajectory and this is a path. Right? And so we said for example AI is a path for us that we think is very important and so we're going to lean into it. And leaning into it Meant we launched B2NEO, which was a Neo Cloud specific offering. We launched V2 Overdrive which is a super high throughput offerings specifically for like AI type use cases. And you know we go after AI, type customers. And so it's like this continual rat tat tat where we say this is the thing we're going to do and then make sure that you know, we're continuing to talk about the same thing quarter after quarter after quarter.
Alex: Building trust with the investor audience by through repetition. One of the reasons I asked you about communications is I distinctly remember before you even went public we were chatting and you said like hey, look content in our blog and various strategies around that are kind of our number one source of inbound leads. And you know that that is still a big source of of your revenue. Tell us a little bit about what you've learned from leveraging content for a number of years and what, what's paid off? What's, what do you see changing if anything, but maybe start at the beginning and, and walk through how you see it evolved for you.
Gleb Budman: So content was absolutely critical, still is. So when we started the company. So I am not a software engineer, I've taken some coding classes but I can barely get hello world out there. Right? my co founders, three of them were software developers. And so when we started the company, M what I was looking to do was everything that was not writing code. And so one of the things that I started doing was in 2007 I started a blog for us and I just started writing about data storage and data backups and data loss and data resilience and all these kinds of things. And frankly, for a while, if five people read any one of my blog posts, that was great. And it usually required me to send an email to my brother and my parents to say, hey, can you read them please?
Alex: He'd be one of the five.
Gleb Budman: They were three of the five, right? So, so for a while there was like nobody was reading these. We were, nobody knew us backwards and you know, was barely on the radar. and then we wrote this one blog post that a million people literally read. And what happened was we had started, we had, we had, you know, like I said, we were planning on using Amazon as their storage platform for S3 storage and decided that was going to be unaffordable. So we ended up designing and building our own storage server and then writing our own file system and building all this technology to make it work. But nobody knew that. All they could see is, oh yeah, we've got backwards, has this nice simple to use service and it's quite affordable. And people started saying, well, they can't actually be doing this right at the price that. So what's probably happening is they're probably venture funded and they're just burning through lots of money and when they, you know, then they'll just run out and stuff. Or maybe they're just not even keeping the data or maybe they're monetizing in some nefarious way or something, you know, and we're like, no, we've actually designed and built a really efficient, cloud infrastructure. But like, nobody could see that. And so we started talking about like, well, maybe we'll talk about that, maybe we'll share a little bit about it. Eventually we went all the way and said, you know what, we will share this design that we built for the storage server and in fact we'll open source the design so other people can use it. Because the, because we felt like our technology was all the software stack and operations, not the physical hardware. We'll share that out there. So we wrote this blog post, it was called Petabytes on a Budget. and I will say it wasn't an accident. I mean we agonized, ah, over those blog posts. We thought it was really interesting. We thought about the headlines and we thought about the subheads and we included images that we thought were good and compelling. We shared the specs for the design and we shared the wiring diagrams and we like, we put all of this meat in to this, to m. You know, make it compelling. I, you know, I found on. We didn't have a PR agency or anything else, so I went on Twitter and I found journalists, who I thought this would be a good, interesting, topic for. And I reached out to them on Twitter and offered them some content on their embargo and we pitch them and the whole bit. And so the first day when we published Petabytes on a Budget, it was written by TechCrunch and Ars Technica and some others. And 300,000 people read that blog post on the first day.
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Gleb Budman: And mind you, again before this we had like five people reading any of our blogs. And what was interesting was that the next day, it actually went higher. and over the next couple of days another 6, 700,000 people read that blog post because after it hit on the press side, it got enough traction on the press side that it got picked up on the social sites, which at that point were Reddit and Slashdot and Dig and things like that, that it went even more viral. and when that happened, even though we weren't selling storage servers, that's what the topic was about with this open source server, we were not selling that. But it had gotten so much awareness and so much readership that we still had a ton of customers, more than we had ever seen before at that time, signed up for Backblaze. In those couple days, I think we had like a thousand people sign up for Backblaze. and it was just kind of this eye opening moment of like, wow, if we put out really great content and do a good job of getting it out there, even if it's not exactly marketing content for what we're selling, it can still be incredibly good legion. And so that was like this eye opening moment. Super exciting, right? but then we had this part where it was like, okay, that's great insight, but it's taken us all this time to develop and design this storage server and file system and all this stuff. We can't just like publish one of these blog posts every second day because like, there's so much technology that we built that we shared. And it's like, how are we going to do this? Like, sure, two years from now we can publish another blog post, you know, but then we kind of like started figuring it out where like we had all these people ask us questions about the blog post. They would say things like, okay, but how did you deal with vibrations and how did you deal with heat and what happens in this scenario and can you tell me more about that? And so we're like, there may be things out of these questions that we can use to then follow up with additional, blog posts that may have, traction and engagement. and that's what we basically did. We built up this blog and several million people a year, read our blog now, which is all about storage content for what we call storage enthusiasts. you know, it's, it has been a really important part of our overall growth story.
Alex: It was beautiful. And, and are you finding that something similar worked with the investment community or. It's not quite the same story like when you, when you think, when you put on your, you know, fund, you know, CFO investment IR hat.
Gleb Budman: So what I will say is that the fact that we had this blog, it was actually part of our IPO story.
Alex: Okay.
Gleb Budman: Because when, when going public, right to the, to the thing we were talking about a few minutes ago, you know, investors would say, but what if Amazon lowers their prices, you know, and, or what if some new startup just starts up and you know, builds new technology and you know, and stuff and it's not that easy, but it's hard to sometimes explain. Well, we have millions of lines of code and took a lot of, you know, expertise to build and stuff like that. But you can point to something like the blog where they can look at it and go, oh, I get it, I understand why that's hard to replicate. It's hard to replicate 15 years worth of blog content, all of the articles and press and engagement that that has gotten you, all of the awareness and brand that that has brought you, and millions of people reading it for this topic, like if you're a brand new startup, like you're not going to start with that and even if you raised $50 million on day one, you're not going to have that. So it was a moat that we had. And it was part of the story when we were going public.
Alex: And I'm sure you could probably write in the blog some of the questions that investors had. Love it. Love it. Well, look, one of the challenges of being in the great opportunities and challenges of being a company CEO in this day and age where the investor sentiment goes up and down, as you mentioned, unpredictably. how do you manage that on a personal level? like you, how do you manage yourself? How do you manage your team to stay focused on that original vision of finding customers, making them happy was awesome. Product versus getting distracted by that market noise?
Gleb Budman: I mean, I will say it's not. There's the easy answer, right? The easy answer is, well, we tell people, you know, don't worry about the stock price, focus on the business. It'll fix itself, right? That's the easy answer. And that's what we try to do. But the reality of it is that people's net worth is tied to the stock price. And we have. Every employee has shares or, you know, RSUs
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Gleb Budman: in the company. So, they can look at, you know, the ticker and be like, today I can buy, ah, you know, I can buy a car or not, you know, or I can buy a house or not, you know, and so it definitely, I think, impacts people emotionally. Right. so, you know, we do try to kind of explain, like, the whys behind things, right? So, you know, like, when one of the things we talk about is that one of the key things that we are being valued on is the growth rate of our B2 cloud storage offering. And so if we do a good job on that, then it will fix itself. And here's how we do a good job on that. We try to. There's parts of the market which you can't control the full reactions to things. but we can say, here's what we can control that will have a more likely impact on things. and so that's part of it. I will say it's, you know, there are parts of being public like this that are great, right? Which is like, you know, people have liquidity when they choose, right? So, like, when you're a private company, all the employees, like, are locked up until and unless the company either sells itself or does a secondary offering on a specific day. And every single employee either gets to or doesn't get to sell, and that's it, and that's done. You know, the nice thing with the public company is, you know, employees can say, oh, I just decided that, you know, my, my kids need to go to school, and so I can sell some shares and, you know, I can pay for private school and stuff like that, right? So they're independent with decisions. So that's beautiful. it was also beautiful when we wanted to raise some additional funding a second time. It was like, you know, super straightforward to do that. It wasn't this whole big process, you know, because we were already public. So there's. There's beautiful parts like that. there are other parts of it where it's like when the stock was, you know, is down, then we have to give more shares to someone for this, to give them the same amount of value. Right. And so there have been times where we've had to kind of relook at it and go, okay, you know, based on where the stock is at, they're probably getting a very good deal right now because we believe that the stock is undervalued and, and, but we have to pay them, you know, based on what it is today. Like, you know. And so, so, you know, so my, my hope is that all the employees and all the investors who are, you know, who have shares right now are basically getting a screaming deal.
Alex: Screaming deal. Right, right.
Gleb Budman: because, you know, because of the opportunity. But that's, you know, it's a thing that. Whereas in a private company, you don't get as much, kind of day to day visibility on, on the, on the stock price, I will say the company that we were at 20 years ago, their intranet, when you opened up, when every employee opened up their browser, the first thing that the Internet had on it was the stock price. And I was like, absolutely not. Absolutely not at backwards. if we want North Star metrics that show up on the Internet, they've got to be things that employees control and things that the employees actually do not. You know, the whims of the market going up and down and affecting their, you know, cortisol levels, you know, that day.
Alex: So on the, and how do you as a CEO, deal with the cortisol fluctuations of everything that's coming your way, right? Like what's been your. Do you have a routine of how do you manage, manage your energy and. Because obviously, you know, when you're moving a large team across challenging tasks, like a lot of people look and monitor how Gleb is looking today, right? Like, what's Gleb's energy? What's Gleb's. You know, people pay attention to power. Like, so you're, you're in the position of, you know, power inside the company. How do you think about that and what have you changed over time, to help yourself succeed there?
Gleb Budman: So I would say that, there are things that I'm better at and things that I'm worse at. What, I'm, I am not as much. Like we have somebody in like one of our sales leaders who is just this like, big personality, ah, you know, like jumping up and down and everything else. Like, that's never been quite my strong suit. Right. but, but where I do have a strong suit is that I tend to be quite even keeled. So whether it's things are great or whether things are going poorly, like I tend to be quite even keeled. and so I do think that, that, that is something that I more naturally bring to us is that, you know, when, when the stock price was shooting up and you know, things are looking great, I was like, this is awesome. Like, you know, you know, like we're doing good stuff and let's keep doing good stuff. And you know, when the market, you know, tanked and you know we got hit by stuff, it's like that's a bummer. And you know, we're still doing good
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Gleb Budman: stuff and we gotta, we should learn from whatever we, you know, like we, whatever issues are happening and then, you know, let's keep working on, on the stuff. So I think I do tend to be just by nature, kind of more even keeled on it. I think that the, the part that feels like it's helpful for the company is the transparency. Right? So when, if, if the employees feel like they don't. Either they don't know why things are happening, or they feel like the, the management team is disconnected from the what's happening, then, then people get very anxious. Right? like when we, the stock price for us like crashed down a couple quarters ago and you know, and people were like, oh my God, what's happening? You know, and we're like, well here's what's happening. You know, like we had said that we were going to have that our, not just our, we were going to grow but that our actual growth rate was going to accelerate quarter, over quarter over quarter throughout all the quarters last year and that it was going to hit 30% and it accelerated Q1 and Q2 and Q3. But what we said was that Q4 was not going to hit 30% because we had this one large customer, that was being quite variable. And so, we had set an expectation. That expectation was that Q4 was going to be north 30%. We are not going to live up to that expectation for Q4 of 2025. This was right. And the market doesn't like the fact that that wasn't the case. And this is why this reaction. Now we all felt that the reaction was overdone, but nonetheless it was driven from that thing. And so we can point to it and go this is what happened. The learning that we had from it was we need to set our guidance in a way that accounts for things like customers that are large, either slipping or being variable or other things. And we can adjust our philosophy on guidance. And so we did that and we talked about that publicly. and then what we can do is, is work on getting more customers that are on committed contracts. We can work on getting more breadth of customers so that one customer doesn't affect. We can do these things by sharing that transparency and explaining the why behind it. I think it helps people deal with the like, oh my God, what's happening out there?
Alex: So being intellectually honest and transparent and at the same time even keeled even whether it's good or bad. And that kind of says, hey, everything, everything is everything, man. You know, it's gonna be okay. You know, like, we're. We're on a mission. So one of the things that I like, about this communications approach, that to. To learn more about is you're also moving the organization to be more, you know, remote first. And, I think that works, well, typically in the technical organizations, they already oftentimes think like that, but it has its challenges. It has to have a culture maybe of written, explicit, written communications. How do you think about that shift? Has it been gradual and was just kind of a deliberate decision to move there. Tell us a little bit about the decision and what you're doing to ensure that it works really well for everyone.
Gleb Budman: So we gave up our office, our headquarters in earlier this year. And people, when I, when I went and told the company we were going to do that, the. There was a certain amount of like, you know, like people going like, oh my God. It's this huge shift. Like, we have had an office for almost 20 years and now we're not going to have an office. And but my, my comment to the team at that point was we are not going remote.
Alex: Right.
Gleb Budman: We are simply acknowledging that we are remote.
Alex: Right, Right.
Gleb Budman: Because the reality of it is, in 2019, up to like from 2007 to 2019, we were 100% in office all the time. Everyone. Right? We had a couple people that were, remote, but basically the entire company was not only in the office all the time, but literally together. Like, we had a lunchroom that we kept shoving people more and more and more people, and so that everybody basically had lunch together, you know, every single day. And it was elbow to elbow, shoved in together. Like, you know, we were bursting at the seams. But Everybody was together, and in many ways, that was such a beautiful experience. Right, because you could over
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Gleb Budman: here, and you could see people and everything else. Right. but that was in 2019. Right? Then when Covid happened. you know, everybody went remote, and we started hiring all over the place. And then when, like, as Covid eased, we started reopening the offices and bringing people back. But we didn't. We didn't hard m mandate that everybody was going to be in the office, in part because half of the company wasn't even here. And so, and then we had various conversations about, like, do we, force people back into the office? Because that's a very popular thing with some companies right now. It's like, okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna say, you have to be in the office. And we let our managers decide, like, for their teams, do they want to do that? And I was talking with one of my, coworkers who said, my manager said, for our team, we have to be in the office three days a week. So I get up in the morning, I drop off my kids at school, and I get in the car, and I drive my 25 minutes to the office. I get into the office, I sit down at my desk, I open up Zoom. I stay on Zoom with all my colleagues, because all of my colleagues are physically remote. They're in other states. And then at the end of the day, I shut down my Zoom, and I get in my car, and I drive my 25 minutes back home. And I literally do not interact with a single one of my colleagues in person in the office, because they are not physically here. And I'm like, that is insane. Right? And so we just, you know, we talk about it, like, over time, it became this thing where, you know, of the. Call it 400ish people that we have at the company, you know, on Monday, nobody would be in the office. On Tuesday, we'd have five people. On Wednesday, because we served lunch, you know, maybe there would be 20, 25 people in the office. you know, on Thursday, there'd be five, and on Friday, there'd be nobody. And it's like, why do we have an office where 80% of the company is not there ever? And et cetera. So it really was. It felt like all of us. For all of us, the executive team, the board, the employees, every single group that I told that said we were giving up the office, they all had the same, But then as they thought about it and we talked about it's simply acknowledging not going remote. Then people kind of went, yeah, I get that, actually. so we've done a few things. So one thing that we did is we said we're getting a WeWork type membership, for people. And it's not for you to go and work by yourself on zoom in an office at WeWork. It's for you to say, if. Whenever you want, if you want to grab three people and you want to work together, whether you're part of the same team or not, if you just want to work with some colleagues, some days, go do it. So that's one. The other is that we have management meetings where every roughly six, eight weeks or so we would get together as a management team and we used to fly everybody to, the headquarters in San Mateo. And instead what we've done is we've outlined where we have pockets of people around the country and we're basically rotating the management meetings to the different locations. We did one in the Bay Area, we did one in Southern California. We're doing one in Washington D.C. we did one in Texas. And we're just using that as an opportunity to grab people together who happen to be located in those areas and interact with each other. we've also. So our chro. one of his big projects, is the challenge I gave to him is if we're going to be a remote company, how do we be the best remote company we can be? And so he's basically working through the, you know, other steps and functions of, you know, what are the playbooks for being a great remote company? And let's learn from companies like, you know, like Automatic and others that have done this for years and years and years, and then apply it to what makes sense for backwards. Like, one of the things that we're doing is we're going to Washington D.C. because we have a data center out there. Part of what we're doing is we're taking the opportunity for everybody to go and get a tour of the data center to also, like, physically visualize.
Alex: Yeah, what is this?
Gleb Budman: What is the business that we. That we're in? Right. and then we're also taking advantage of meeting some customers out there as well while we're there. So it's, it's, it's taking advantage of, like, you know, like, it's great to be remote, from the purpose of, like, you minimize, commute times for people and things like that. there are downsides. Like, it's nice, it's harder to overhear things. So one of the things that we've also started to do is, is, we've set up these. You can opt in, but I think maybe about a third of the company has opted in to these, every two week coffee chats where the system will randomly connect two people from different parts of the organization to say, here's 20 minutes, here's a potential couple of topics of conversation. Not necessarily work related, just getting to meet other people the way that you would if you were walking down the hallway and meet someone in the kitchen. so just finding little ways to connect, in the organization too.
Alex: Amazing. Well, Gleb, this has been so great. I salute you. You're building not only the best storage company and the most innovative storage
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Alex: company, but the best at content for that industry and the best at, being remote. First, very deliberately lovely conversation, great to catch up and thanks for sharing the nuggets along your journey.
Gleb Budman: Thanks Alex. Great chatting with you.