As Agari celebrates our 10th anniversary, I've had the opportunity to reflect on the last decade as an Agarian and how my life has changed as a result of my work with this company. It has been an undeniably exciting ten years, but also one full of challenges as we solve some of the hardest problems in email security.
Fulfilling Our Mission
I joined Agari when it was called Authentication Metrics ten years ago, partially due to the fact that this small company of one was founded by Patrick Peterson. He and I previously worked together at an email security company called IronPort, which had been acquired by Cisco, and I knew that his vision for this new company would allow us to make a difference in the world.
While it may seem cliché, joining this company was not about making money—it was about beating the bad guys and keeping people's inboxes safe. I joined Patrick to solve the problems that allow unwary folks to become victims of cybercrime, and I've been thrilled to see the company grow from two people to nearly two hundred as we work to fulfill that mission.
We started as two people working on one hard problem, but we've expanded to so much more than that. Throughout my engineering career at Agari, I've had the opportunity to work not only on our initial product that eventually turned into Agari DMARC Protection, but also on every subsequent product as we work to stop emerging and more aggressive forms of cybercrime. Ten years feels like a long time, but when you're doing exciting work with great people and seeing that work make a difference in the world, that time flies by.
Growing Our Potential
As we've grown from a tiny company to where we are today, one thing that has surprised me is that we've become more productive per-capita than what I have experienced in the past. My thought has always been that tiny startups defeat larger startups in terms of productivity pretty much always, especially as more processes and review cycles are put in place. That said, while we have added some process overhead here at Agari, it seems like we’re more efficient than when we started.
The processes that we do have make us better employees and provide a better experience for our customers, while not becoming so rigid that we cannot make a fast change. It's a good balance, and it allows us to provide the best possible products to the people who have come to rely on them. I believe that we’ll continue on that path over the next 10 years—staying efficient and avoiding unnecessary process bloat that sometimes comes along with larger companies.
Keeping Our Great Culture
For many people in the tech industry—maybe especially in the San Francisco Bay Area tech industry—working for ten years at one company is taboo. It has somehow become a signal that the employee is washed up and just looking for somewhere to retire. Thankfully, I couldn’t feel any less-so at Agari.
It is not uncommon that I feel like a new hire at Agari, learning new technologies and getting help from coworkers who might have started (or even graduated) a month ago. That is one of the qualities of the company that has kept me around, and why I enjoy coming in to work every day—even after a decade of working on the same team. We hire great people who all have something to teach, and then let them teach us. The entire team works together to solve tough problems, which is why we're able to fulfill our mission to protect digital communications so that humanity prevails over evil.
Want to join the Agari team? Check out our open positions!