Celebrating a Decade of Growth
Posted by Mark Gardner on 2011-02-24 23:33:00 UTC
In the next few months InfoEther will reach the major milestone of being 10 years old!
Rich and I formed the company at the one of the worst times possible, during the Web 1.0 Dot-Com crash. Our attempts at raising funding hit a similar wall that year, 2001, when everyone went to ground in the uncertainty following the September 11th attacks.
We planned to be a product company but we were able to "pivot" (using the latest overwrought term) to a software development consultancy and became a subcontractor on a major DARPA project. We expanded on the relatively modest role originally given to us and used Ruby in what we believed to be the first commercially paid use of the language in the US, when we developed a massive testing infrastructure with it. That was in 2002.
During this same period Rich and Chad, an independent consultant at the time, along with Dave Thomas, were involved in building the non-profit Ruby Central into the major force pushing the Ruby language to a broader community, producing the largest Ruby conferences, and later the largest Ruby on Rails conferences. Both annual conferences saw spectacular growth as the language (Ruby) and the Web framework (Rails) spread to a large and innovative developer community worldwide.
In 2005-2006 we raised seed funding, including our own self-investment, and shifted back to our goal of building innovative software products. We ended up creating products that were way ahead of the market and the infrastructure in 2006. That fact, and a challenging funding environment, had us "pivot" again to a consultancy where we used the expertise we gained in our product development to capture millions of dollars in software development work - building products for others.
That timing was fortuitous because Rails was just beginning to really take off. We steadily built up our client base and have performed work and training for well over 40 clients, almost all commercial, since 2007.
We doubled nearly every year with the exception of the post-2008 financial market crash, but even that didn't slow us down for long. It turned out the larger corporate world was discovering the cost and speed advantages of using open source technology and Ruby and Rails skills became very valuable and highly sought. Our reputation, thanks to the exposure of our exceptional people in the Ruby/Rails community worldwide, drew projects to us.
We thank our team for helping us build a great company, and would like to thank those that have made the Ruby and Rails community such a vibrant place which has helped us achieve a decade of growth in an exciting and ever evolving environment.