This puts Acquia in the position of truly having to prove its value in order to make money, since anyone is free to run Drupal Commons on any web host without paying Acquia a single cent. Commons is a “fully featured collaboration website in a box.” In my first year at Acquia, I led a redesign and relaunch of Commons, and despite our relatively small product team size (we scaled from two to roughly eight people depending on how you count), we were directly competitive with proprietary vendors like Jive and Yammer - Companies with millions of dollars and a strong focus in what industry analysts call the “social collaboration” space.īecause Commons is free and 100% open source, only a subset of the roughly 2,000 individual Commons websites across the web are Acquia customers. I spent most of my time at Acquia working on Drupal Commons, another distribution of Drupal. All of this growth is for a business that is based around enabling organizations to succeed with free software and would not have been possible without Acquia’s team of many smart, talented and hard working individuals. Earlier this year we disclosed that we hit the $100 million/year revenue mark. And while revenue is not the only way to measure success, it is a reasonable proxy for growth. 500’s list of companies in 2012 with three-year revenue growth of 10,461%, making it the eighth fastest growing company in any category on the list, and was the eighth fastest growing private software company in 2013. Acquia was the fastest growing private software company in the Inc. Less than four years later, we’re over 600 people. When I joined Acquia, we were approximately 120 employees.

Acquia: From 120 to 600+ People in < Four YearsĪcquia has grown rapidly by many metrics. Struck by that scale and the uniqueness of the opportunity to join relatively early and help shape the company, we joined Acquia in 2011. So, why sell a company we loved? A big part of the decision was scale: at 120 people, Acquia was one of the larger organizations with expertise in Drupal and had plans to expand further.

Attendee counts on conferences using COD ranged from 100-10,000 people and spanned causes such as political action and grassroots radio in the United States, oncology in the UK, entrepreneurship in Australia, and of course, the majority of Drupal-focused conferences whose websites launched when Drupal 6 was in its prime. We launched the Drupal Scout security review service, and adoption of COD (the Conference Organizing Distribution of Drupal) continued to gain traction outside of the Drupal world, bringing in new clients as well as a diverse range of conferences in the United States and internationally. Months after starting conference and security review work and publicly declaring these focus areas, our stream of incoming work grew and we raised our rates. We continued our strategy of focusing on overlap between customer needs and sponsored enhancement to open source projects, only now we channeled an increasing percentage of our overall work towards projects within our focus areas. Eventually though, we began to narrow our focus to two main areas: software powering interactive conference and event websites, and security review services for Drupal-based websites. This approach worked well enough, keeping us busy with a steady stream of work from past client referrals and new customers who found us through our open source work. In our earlier years, we offered a broad range of consulting, software development and training services around the open source Drupal project. We were happy, our own bosses, funded entirely by work on a diverse and exciting range of clients including the Economist, Intel and a range of smaller organizations, and above all we were a small team of close friends.Ģ011 was an inflection point for GVS.

I suspect that if you’d asked us in 2009 about the prospect of GVS being acquired, we might have laughed off the idea. Despite the fanfare that sometimes accompanies acquisitions, selling GVS was not a primary goal for us. I joined Acquia when we sold our five-person company, Growing Venture Solutions to Acquia in the summer of 2011. I’m extremely excited about joining SeatGeek but wanted first to take some time to reflect on my time with Acquia and Drupal. The SeatGeek apps and website make it easy to find and compare great deals on great seats for concerts, sporting events, Broadway and more. After an incredible three years, eight months and 23 days with Acquia, I’m starting a new role next week as a Product Manager at SeatGeek.

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