Mission’s 3rd Birthday

Mission turns three today, and I wanted to reflect on our journey to this milestone. 

Our origin story started for me back in 2014, when Red Hat (now part of IBM) acquired Inktank, which I co-founded. Ceph, the open source software that Inktank contributed to and supported, was being rapidly adopted by companies wanting to build object and block storage services similar to S3 and EBS from AWS. Public cloud services were in high growth mode and had become proven platforms for hosting a wide range of applications and data. I was pretty sure at that time that the public cloud would eventually become the largest technology market - and the speed at which developers could develop and test new applications was already creating an explosion of innovation. I wanted to be a part of it. 

Fast forward to 2016, after exiting my role as CEO of DreamHost, I was studying the public cloud ecosystem and honing in on the emerging need for a new kind of managed services provider that would help companies migrate to the cloud and then continuously manage and optimize their cloud environment. A number of companies were already doing this, but I felt that their general approach was to offer up services that were based on managing 20th century IT, not the cloud. So I went out to my investor network and found Great Hill Partners, who were excited by the thesis and agreed to back me as Entrepreneur-in-Residence to refine and validate the vision. After eight months we incorporated a new company Cloud Platform, Inc. (which became Mission) on November 13, 2017.

In order to get up and running quickly, we wanted to find two or three bootstrapped companies that had cloud expertise and differentiated services to acquire. Within six months, Reliam, Stratalux and G2 had become a part of Mission. The leadership team was recruited and with a CRO and CMO in place, we collaboratively created the Mission brand. Our vision was to design differentiated cloud management, optimization and consulting services that were as agile, flexible, and fast-to-benefit for customers as the cloud itself. 

The next 18 months were intensely focused on hiring talented cloud engineers and consultants while refining our Managed Cloud and Managed DevOps services. In addition, we focused on building out our sales, marketing and customer success teams to engage with prospects and customers and guide them to the best services for their needs. In 2020 we launched our Cloud Foundation service, and became an AWS Premier Partner and the #1 in their Startup and SMB segments in the US.

Through it all our team has strengthened our culture and established six core values that we live by: Focused on Their Mission, Accountability and Action, Strive for Excellence, Be Inclusive, Continuous Growth, and Embrace Life. We now have over 120 employees dedicated to helping our customers transform their businesses with the power of the cloud. So “cheers to that” as we celebrate Mission’s third birthday!