It seems like just yesterday that I announced that Scalyr had raised Series A. It was a big step for the company. We’ve been pretty capital efficient, so we weren’t short on cash, but the opportunities in front of us were such that it made sense to take that step to accelerate our growth.
2018 was another big year for Scalyr. We grew our customer base to over 300 paying customers, an increase of more than 100%. Our team doubled last year and it’ll double again this year. And now we’re taking another big step to accelerate our growth: I’m thrilled to announce that Christine Heckart has joined Scalyr as our new Chief Executive Officer.
In case you’re just tuning in: the person Christine is replacing is me. As I told the team at the internal announcement, “this is an upgrade.” Scalyr is an amazing adventure, and it’s been a privilege for me to lead this team for the last 7 years. I’ve grown a lot as a person in the process. But Scalyr is growing faster. 🙂
It was time for division of labor. I was no longer the best fit for the job, and the job was not the best fit for me. I need a partner to focus on scaling the commercial side of the business, while I focus on technology and product vision. So we started the search for a new CEO. We undertook an extensive search process and were fortunate to attract a series of extremely high caliber candidates.
One of the candidates was Christine. She is simply an amazing human being. In the first interview, I found myself hoping I’d have the chance to work with this very special person – but also figuring the odds were low because after all, we were evaluating a lot of candidates. But the more time I spent with Christine, the more obvious it became that not only would she be a terrific person to work with personally, she’s also exactly the leader we were looking for. he has a strong track record of success at industry leaders like Cisco, Juniper Networks, Microsoft and NetApp. In her 25+ years in the technology industry, she has held a variety of roles including COO, GM, president and CMO. She’s known for her strategic vision, understanding of market transitions and ability to uncover a company’s higher purpose. Her history – we did a lot of back-channel references – is littered with people who would jump at the chance to work with her again. And most important, she’s excited about who we are; she’s here to accelerate Scalyr, not to reinvent it. We’ve worked hard to build a great culture as we build the company, and Christine is the right leader for our culture as well as our business.
Meanwhile, I’m not going anywhere! We still have a lot of work to do to achieve what we set out to accomplish at our founding. With the new title of Chairman and Founder, I’ll be focusing on where I can add the most value: technology, product, and evangelism. I’m looking forward to diving in as we continue to shape the future of unified observability.
2019 will be a big year for Scalyr and we look forward to continuing to partner with you. We’re always looking for great engineers, so if you want to work on interesting, challenging problems with amazing people… or you have friends that would… please drop by scalyr.com/jobs. Thanks as always for your continued patronage, feedback, and support. Live, log, and prosper!
