

Backblaze turns 5 – a startup grows up - ryannielsen
http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/04/20/backblaze-turns-5-a-startup-grows-up/

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ryannielsen
A fantastic timeline of how to build a company, one step at a time. Just keep
pushing forward and suddenly, five years later, you have a thriving,
successful, and profitable company.

Congrats, Backblaze! And thank you for sharing.

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brianwski
Thanks! It's been extremely fun this time around partly because we decided not
to take any VC funding. (We were all part of a previous startup that took VC
funding and it causes some complications we wanted to avoid this time.)

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rdl
Wow, congratulations!

Are you still all in one datacenter? Have you considered replication?

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swGooF
Great Story, even better product. I recently signed up for my 3rd year of
service with BackBlaze.

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jgmmo
Whats the deal with the guy in horsehead costume?

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brianwski
In the Backblaze spirit of building it ourselves to save money, instead of any
traditional security system, we have little web cams that monitor the office
for motion and page us with pictures of the activity when there is unexpected
motion too early before anybody is supposed to be in the office.

I wanted to test if anybody was paying attention to the alerts, so I bought a
horse head mask and walked around the office super early. The robe was a
random afterthought to help disguise my clothing that might be recognized.

I'm happy to report the experiment worked. Motion detected, emails sent out
within a few minutes. I also had a good laugh. :-)

