Today is CircleCI’s 10-year anniversary. I sent the whole staff an email that captures the sentiment of this important moment and I wanted to share it with you here. It offers a glimpse into what we’ve accomplished as an organization in the last decade and how much more we’ll accomplish in the decades to come.
To: All staff
From: Jim
Subject: CircleCI at 10 and a look ahead
Date: September 28, 2021
Team,
Thanks again for joining the September Call Hands earlier this month. We are concluding the month by sharing some of our newsworthy milestones tomorrow. But taking a moment to recognize the success of 10 years for all of us who have built and continue to build CircleCI is important for our future.
We look a lot different than we did in 2011. We once celebrated 1,000 customers using our platform. Today, we are the critical infrastructure for over 200,000 teams. In 2014, we celebrated what a $6 million Series A funding round meant for our future. This year, we announced $315.5 million in total funding and a $1.7 billion valuation.
We are a part of this relatively small club of companies that have made it 10 years, and for that, we have a lot to celebrate. But success wasn’t (and still isn’t) guaranteed.
What will it take to be successful in years 11, 12, and so on?
Just like in the first 10, we will continue to focus on ways we can solve problems for our customers. We’ve worked hard to scale CircleCI to meet the needs of the most high-performing developer teams in the world. That said, we want every customer — from the developer who is running their first build to the most experienced DevOps teams — to have an amazing experience.
But really, our success in this next year, and the next 10 years, depends on you. The way we operate as individuals, teams, and an organization as a whole will make or break our ability to win this huge opportunity in front of us. You are here for a reason and your contributions matter.
Approaching your work with a sense of ownership is the mindset we need to move quickly and successfully. Thinking about how to experiment, and then, how to apply those learnings, are important as we continue to grow. And while our north star destination remains the same, know that our path to get there might change. Change is an inevitable part of our process. We’re in the business of change and we will be living that as an organization as well. We will always be iterating, experimenting, failing, succeeding, and trying again. The most important thing is our ability to learn quickly and embrace a culture of fast experimentation.
Exciting times are ahead.
Jim
