How are you preserving the culture and keeping your best teammates? Usually the pressure to stop R&D and focus only on margin expansion makes this hard to do - that your experience yet or things still good?

Great question. That's not been our experience. Right now, we're in growth mode. Hire hire hire. Go faster.

Are we watching product margin and taking action to maximize it? Absolutely. But that's all revolved around technical steps (LLM token caching for example). Our current Product and Engineering headcount is only around 15 so we're already lean. We need to hire more, but we're keeping the bar high. I have no goal for bloating an engineering team just to make it look like we're doing the right thing (hiring). Every hire has to add immense value.

We're living in a time where success as a small team doesn't have to mean the team growing to be so big it's not fun anymore. The best cultures I've been a part of have always revolved around highly skilled small team of people that work their tails off and depend on each other.

Did your employees have equity? If so how did this process work, with the PE firm?

Employees have stock options, not stock. Those options are now worth more. Probably can't share too much more detail than that on financial specifics.

Are you flying business class?

Ha, no. Southwest, boarding group 5.

What’s the company? How did you start? Are you a co-founder?

Started by a team of 3 three years ago. I knew one of them from my time spent in grad school and living in NH. I joined a year after it formed but before it really took off. Founder #5 type of situation. Significant equity but can't claim I was there from day 0.

Did PE come to you or did you go looking for the investment?

Came to us. Some of our founders had previous success and were funding out of their own pocket. We had just turned profitable, but PE money allows a different velocity which we wanted. So when they approached us looking for a solution in our space, we took the meeting. One thing led to another.

Is the ownership structure of the company a mix of PE, VC and bootstrap? How does that work? Speaking for myself, "taking" any kind of money or getting outright acquired by PE is a huge red flag for a startup and I wouldn't work at such a place unless I was completely out of options.