Closing a Chapter

Almost exactly eleven years ago my good friend and I sat on the couch with my very pregnant wife and convinced her that we were going to quit our very stable jobs to start a company, and that this was a good idea.

This conversation went about as well as you might expect, but after a lot of questions and assurances everyone was on board.

Both he and I had spent our careers to this point in the military. After meeting through our work as part of the US Air Force's cyber defense mission we eventually ended up partnered together training groups of airmen who would go on to be enterprise threat hunters.

Through this experience we had developed a strong conviction about missing components in the status quo security posture advocated by cyber security professionals and implemented around the world. We decided to bring automated threat hunting tools to the private sector and this was impetus for Infocyte, Inc.

We spent a few months building new tools to deliver threat hunting-as-a-service to our potential customers. To our surprise, we actually had customers! We were able to leverage our new product to help companies respond to ongoing attacks. We felt incredible, as you might guess.

Shortly after these early successes and some local news coverage, we were approached by a venture capital firm and encourage to take our in-house tools and turn them into a software product that could be sold, instead of used as part of a service.

This was a great idea, save one small detail: we had no idea how to be a software company.

After many ups and downs and, we started assembling a solid team to help us build the product. Time went on. We faced scaling problems, marketing problems, funding issues, bugs, missteps, and mistakes along the way. At the same time, we were gaining traction, customers, and making money! Everything seemed like it was starting to work.

Then we began having discussions around being acquired by Datto, Inc. After a lot of stress, many long days and sleepless nights, the deal was done. Infocyte, Inc no longer existed but was now part of Datto. That in itself was somewhat bittersweet, but ultimately it was a great step forward for the product and opened up opportunities we would not have otherwise had.

After approximately six months of this "new normal", I woke up to a flood of slack messages and news articles announcing that Kaseya had declared their intentions to acquire Datto, consolidating the two biggest players in the MSP market. This meant in a matter of months we had gone from a twenty eight person company to an almost three thousand person company, then suddenly an almost six thousand person company.

This was a shock to our team but we simply pressed on and continued to grow the product. Eventually we were entrusted with an additional entirely new product while being handed the reins of two additional existing ones.

To look back on all we accomplished through the past decade still astonishes me. I will most definitely need to write a more thorough accounting of the entire endeavour start to finish. I believe the enduring legacy of what we built is a testament to perseverance, hard work, vision, and great team building.

With all this said, I have ended my journey with the company and product I poured so much of myself into over the past eleven years. Closing this chapter of my life was a complicated choice, but I know it was the right one.