Every year in early February, after closing our fiscal year, we discuss the year that was during our monthly All Hands meeting. This year we reflected on a year unlike any other.
It was a year in which the unimaginable became our shared reality. Together, as a global collective, with our families, customers and partners, we Zoomed and pushed and pulled together in ways we had not had to do before.
As we approach some incredible milestones—including expanding our product family, reaching the one million users mark with nearly 7,500 customers that represent a combined 50 billion media assets—I can’t help but feel immensely proud.
We’ve always been a global company and relying on technologies to keep us connected is something tech companies tend to do well. My co-founders and I started Cloudinary from a small office outside Tel Aviv and were lucky to have customers from all over the world from the start. Today, we have customers in more than 100 countries and are a fully remote team connected across five offices in the US, UK, Israel, Poland and Singapore.
As we adjusted to our new reality, in some ways it was business as usual and in other ways it was anything but. We welcomed new customers and supported existing ones, responding to a more urgent call to improve their online experiences to ensure customer engagement didn’t slip as in-person engagement moved online. Our hearts went out to the hardest hit industries like travel and entertainment, and we worked together to support more than 100 customers that needed our help weathering the storm.
Our Product and CTO office teams continued to push the bounds of innovation, from expanding our game-changing AI capabilities to work on the forefront of making the modern web a better place, including next-gen image and video formats like AVIF/AV1 and JPEG XL, the first major update to the JPEG in more than 30 years.
Our HR team worked tirelessly to ensure our employees were supported—and that our family ethos remained. We turned our annual week-long planning event, the Gathering, into a four-day virtual experience that exceeded our expectations and was instrumental in helping us set the strategic roadmaps for work that’s already underway.
My optimism about what this year holds for us is rooted in gratitude for what we were able accomplish in 2020, together with our customers and partners. As I told the team in our All Hands meeting, being a bootstrapped company affords us the privilege of working not towards maximizing shareholder value, but on maximizing our customers’ value. Your business is our lifeline and we take great pride in serving you. Thank you so much for trusting us with your business. It means a lot.
Here’s to a 2021 that’s much kinder than its predecessor. We’re ready.
