Throughout careers, especially those chartered in startup land, there are distinctly important trips, meetings and customers that shape the future of companies and their ultimate impact on their sector.
Much of the foundational vision of York IE began in scaling an internet infrastructure company called, Dyn. The domain name system (DNS) business had humble beginnings long before reaching $100M ARR and becoming the world’s leader of such an important capability (sold to Oracle in 2016). It began in a dorm room, founded by an undergraduate engineer named Tim Wilde, as a free community service for consumers. Dyn then found its growth legs scaling into a service for startups and SMBs alike, then grew into mid-market enterprises and finally conquered the global 2000 enterprise – to help them all manage website and application traffic and grow together. The more critical a corporation’s websites and applications were, the greater the client and its use of Dyn services.
It was a slow and steady ladder climb, brick by brick with repetitive and consistent effort, to the traditional enterprise and investible big success. To display that our little business out of New Hampshire was worthy of such clientele and could be trusted managing such important global internet infrastructure and traffic, we needed to prove it, over many, many years. People see the end result but it’s a gosh darn grind.
And, then suddenly, we ended up arriving at a monumental moment in Ohio. We ran a sales process like none other before it with our top sales rep and top sales engineer leading the charge. I was the CRO and executive sponsor like I was for all major deals, but this one was different in its target. We responded to an RFP first, with our own flair, and were invited to Columbus, OH, to pitch JP Morgan Chase and their core asset chase.com. Vendors would march in and present back to back to back to back and the winner would secure the business. All of our competition that day were corporate public juggernauts – not entrepreneurial dreamers like us.
I remember them asking us to walk them through our banking clients to which I wittingly replied: “Our belief is that Chase doesn’t want to be like other banks and should aspire for much more and have the performance and security of the greatest web brands on the planet like Amazon, Salesforce, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook and more. All Dyn clients.” They made a bet on us because they wanted something different, disruptive and unique.
Well, we won that deal. They bet on us and we delivered. It was a heck of a memorable trip. It changed our trajectory and those types of deals became the core thesis for why Oracle would acquire our company a few years later for $600M and make us an essential driver of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
And we just won another major deal on another trip to Ohio. This time in Cincinnati… but the win is equally as game changing, potentially greater still for our investment and operating firm and our portfolio. Our vision is becoming reality.
York IE has arrived.
Footnote: I wrote this while on a Delta flight from Boston to Cincinnati prior to the meeting. Sometimes, you simply need to set your mind to a result and make it so. Stay tuned for more details over the coming months. Onward!