This week, DigitalOcean became a public company.
Moisey Uretsky, Ben Uretsky, Alec Hartman, Mitch Wainer, and Jeff Carr founded the company and it’s been an incredible journey for them since they were in the Techstars Boulder Accelerator in 2012. That was class #17!
In 2019, Yancey Spruill became CEO of DigitalOcean. I had gotten to know Yancey while serving on the board at SendGrid (another Techstars accelerator company), where Yancey was CFO and COO. SendGrid IPO’d in late 2017 and was later acquired by Twilio. So Yancey now has the distinction of having IPO’d not one but two Techstars accelerator companies! Top that!
This afternoon, I went on a little trip down memory land and dug up a few Techstars videos about DigitalOcean that we made over the years.
How did DigitalOcean succeed in such a crowded cloud services marketplace? How did they break through the early “No” they heard from so many investors? Here’s a 2014 video where we focused on that while the company was young and growing.
What did it feel like when they hit the tipping point?
By 2018, it was clear the company was a rocket ship. In this video (about a minute in) they talk about what Techstars gave to them.
The entire DigitalOcean embodies #GiveFirst and has given back more than we ever could have imagined. From active mentorship for new companies in our accelerator programs, to providing cloud services credits to entrepreneurs around the world, it’s an awesome joy to stand and slowly applaud their success today.
