A year in review: CEO’s reflections

It’s hard to believe that I joined DigitalOcean just 12 short months ago. Like many of you, the past year has been so wildly different from what I had imagined, but it’s also reaffirmed many of the beliefs I held on day one at DO. 

When I first joined, I wrote about the need to identify what makes this company “magical” and to preserve that magic at all costs. The answer was simple: We continue to lead and live by our values. DigitalOcean’s values start with community and end with love. This year has been a testament to how powerful that combination can be. 

During the pandemic, our simple, easy-to-use and cost-effective cloud has become essential to helping our customers with continuity, and enabling their continued success despite the many challenges resulting from this virus. Beyond the rising technical demands of efficiency, productivity, remote work and education, we are seeing many entrepreneurs continuing to start businesses. 

We have built a very robust infrastructure platform on which businesses are created and also where they can scale and grow. Over the past year, I’ve met with many, many customers and they all share a similar story. They are strivers and entrepreneurs. They have staked their trust in DigitalOcean as a place where they can test their ideas, build their businesses, and realize their dreams. All of us at DO are so honored that you, our customers, come to us and are fully committed to creating the tools and capabilities that will enable your success.

I’m proud of the way our team at DO has worked together to support the developers, early-stage startups, and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who rely on our tools. We put their needs at our core. We strived to provide them with the white-glove customer experience they deserve. And we focused on delivering our mission to simplify cloud computing so developers and entrepreneurs can easily test their ideas, build their businesses, and realize their dreams.

We charted a course for three pillars to our execution focused on growth. We call it: Grow faster, grow smarter and grow together. To “grow faster,” we focus on better serving customers to help their growth – including more product innovations and improving our customer support to better enable our customers success. To “grow smarter,” we direct our people and capital to efficiently deliver value to our customers by improving our infrastructure to support our customers’ growth objectives. And to “grow together,” we invest in everyone at DO, so our company continues to be an incredible place to work and grow as we serve this incredible opportunity to help our customers.

We continue to honor our core values by supporting our community through tumultuous times. We launched Hub for Good to provide infrastructure credits, donations, and an ever-growing directory of projects and resources to help our community come together and get involved with the challenges we all are facing. Our program started with COVID-19 relief, but expanded to include nonprofits, projects, and startups that are actively fighting for social justice and equality. To date, Hub for Good has helped launch more than 1,200 projects and DigitalOcean has donated $100,000 to our Hub for Good Fund.

And all of this was accomplished while continuing to scale and grow our own business. Earlier this year, we reached $300M in annual recurring revenue, while serving more than 500,000 customers across the globe, refinanced our debt, and also secured a new $50 million Series C funding. 

I’m extremely proud of what this team has been able to achieve over the past year and I look forward to even more success ahead. While I can’t predict what will be in store for us, I can promise this – DigitalOcean is here to help developers, startups, and SMBs achieve their dreams. We will never lose sight of our customers or our values, and we will never stop showering our community with our signature “DO love.”