Gleb Budman
- CEO at Backblaze
GetLatka talk
How Backblaze Bootstrapped for 15 Years to a $65M ARR Nasdaq IPO in 2021 (SaaS Open Talk by CEO Gleb Budman)
Gleb Budman (CEO of Backblaze) gave a talk on March 17, 2023.
Backblaze figures from the talk
- ARR at IPO (2021)
- $65M
- Revenue (2014)
- $10M
- Bank Fee on IPO Raise (2021)
- 7%
- Blog Readers
- 3,000,000 per year
- IPO Cost (2021)
- $10M to $15M
“We started by bootstrapping. We put our jobs. We took, we said for one year, we're gonna do nothing, in terms of venture funding. There's gonna be no PowerPoints. There's gonna be no no spreadsheets. There's gonna be no pitches. There's gonna focus on product, focus on customers, see how it goes. So we, we did that for fifteen years.”
“We built B2, which was our second offering. It's cloud storage as a service. It's like Amazon's S3 service for object storage, but it's one fifth the price point. So if you're using Amazon S3 and you want to save a whole bunch of money, make it easier, come check out B2.”
“This was the chart that we went out on the roadshow with. Few different numbers on there, but focus on the one that says 65,000,000 of ARR. It was not 300. We still went public.”
Bio
Gleb Budman is CEO and co-founder of Backblaze. Along with his team, Gleb bootstrapped Backblaze to millions in revenue and profitability. The company won the SIIA CODiE for Best Cloud Storage and secured a spot on Deloitte's Fast 500 fastest growing technology companies as a result of its 917% five-year revenue growth. Previously, Gleb led the product teams from pre-funding through acquisition at Kendara and MailFrontier, and founded three prior companies. He received his MBA from Berkeley's Haas School, has been a speaker at events including GigaOm Structure, Massive Storage Systems and Technology, and SNIA; profiled by Inc. and Forbes; and holds 5 patents on security.