Reflections on Drupal, GVS and Acquia
After an incredible three years, eight months and 23 days with Acquia, I’m  starting a new role next week as a Product Manager at SeatGeek. The SeatGeek apps and website make it easy to find and compare great deals on great seats for concerts, sporting events, Broadway and more. I’m extremely excited about joining SeatGeek but wanted first to take some time to reflect on my time with Acquia and Drupal.
GVS
I joined Acquia when we sold our five-person company, Growing Venture Solutions to Acquia in the summer of 2011. Despite the fanfare that sometimes accompanies acquisitions, selling GVS was not a primary goal for us. I suspect that if you’d asked us in 2009 about the prospect of GVS being acquired, we might have laughed off the idea. We were happy, our own bosses, funded entirely by work on a diverse and exciting range of clients including the Economist, Intel and a range of smaller organizations, and above all we were a small team of close friends.
2011 was an inflection point for GVS. In our earlier years, we offered a broad range of consulting, software development and training services around the open source Drupal project. This approach worked well enough, keeping us busy with a steady stream of work from past client referrals and new customers who found us through our open source work. Eventually though, we began to narrow our focus to two main areas: software powering interactive conference and event websites, and security review services for Drupal-based websites. We continued our strategy of focusing on overlap between customer needs and sponsored enhancement to open source projects, only now we channeled an increasing percentage of our overall work towards projects within our focus areas.
Months after starting conference and security review work and publicly declaring these focus areas, our stream of incoming work grew and we raised our rates. We launched the Drupal Scout security review service, and adoption of COD (the Conference Organizing Distribution of Drupal) continued to gain traction outside of the Drupal world, bringing in new clients as well as a diverse range of conferences in the United States and internationally. Attendee counts on conferences using COD ranged from 100-10,000 people and spanned causes such as political action and grassroots radio in the United States, oncology in the UK, entrepreneurship in Australia, and of course, the majority of Drupal-focused conferences whose websites launched when Drupal 6 was in its prime.
So, why sell a company we loved? A big part of the decision was scale: at 120 people, Acquia was one of the larger organizations with expertise in Drupal and had plans to expand further. Â Struck by that scale and the uniqueness of the opportunity to join relatively early and help shape the company, we joined Acquia in 2011. Indeed, we found scale.
Acquia: From 120 to 600+ People in < Four Years
Acquia has grown rapidly by many metrics. When I joined Acquia, we were approximately 120 employees. Less than four years later, we’re over 600 people. Acquia was the fastest growing private software company in the Inc. 500’s list of companies in 2012 with three-year revenue growth of 10,461%, making it the eighth fastest growing company in any category on the list, and was the eighth fastest growing private software company in 2013. And while revenue is not the only way to measure success, it is a reasonable proxy for growth. Earlier this year we disclosed that we hit the $100 million/year revenue mark. All of this growth is for a business that is based around enabling organizations to succeed with free software and would not have been possible without Acquia’s team of many smart, talented and hard working individuals.
Drupal Commons
I spent most of my time at Acquia working on Drupal Commons, another distribution of Drupal. Commons is a “fully featured collaboration website in a box.” In my first year at Acquia, I led a redesign and relaunch of Commons, and despite our relatively small product team size (we scaled from two to roughly eight people depending on how you count), we were directly competitive with proprietary vendors like Jive and Yammer - Companies with millions of dollars and a strong focus in what industry analysts call the “social collaboration” space.
Because Commons is free and 100% open source, only a subset of the roughly 2,000 individual Commons websites across the web are Acquia customers. This puts Acquia in the position of truly having to prove its value in order to make money, since anyone is free to run Drupal Commons on any web host without paying Acquia a single cent. I’m proud that the Grammy awards is an Acquia customer and uses Commons to power their community of Grammy voters and submitters, but I particularly enjoy seeing when organizations without large budgets used Commons. For example, the Well Project is, to quote their website, a non-profit organization whose mission is to change the course of the HIV/AIDS pandemic through a unique and comprehensive focus on women and girls. You can read more about the Well Project on their website, their “a girl like me” blog series, and on their Facebook page.
On Drupal
According to my Drupal.org profile page, I’m a few months away from my ninth Drupal birthday. Drupal, and specifically the people who make up the Drupal Community, has been an extremely powerful positive force in my life, fueling my career growth and introducing me to an international group of diverse contributors to the project. I’ve met some extremely smart and kind people through Drupal. My experience has been that every bit of effort that I’ve put towards learning more and participating more actively in Drupal has been repaid many times fold. I started out nine years ago asking dumb questions and through a mix of great mentors and a lot of effort, I eventually became a module maintainer, and had the privilege of sharing what I learned at dozens of conferences.
If you’re considering participating more actively in Drupal, do it! If you’re not sure how to get started, ask me and I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.
If you’re an organization considering getting more involved in Drupal, you should do it. Drupal’s value comes from a thriving ecosystem of providers with diverse areas of expertise. Scratch your own niche and prosper.
In sharing the news about departing Acquia and joining a company that doesn’t use Drupal, folks have asked me whether I’m “leaving Drupal.” Not exactly. I have stepped down as the primary maintainer for Drupal Commons, and next week’s DrupalCon LA will be the first North American DrupalCon that I’ve missed since I started attending in 2007. And while I’ll likely be less active as a day-to-day maintainer of my contrib projects, I plan to stay involved where I can. I hope to continue to present at Drupal events and to provide advisory input where my historical knowledge can be useful.
SeatGeek
So, why the move towards a company that’s not involved with Drupal? I’ve always been excited about technology, but even more excited about the people using technology. Who are they? Why are they using a given product? How does it fit into their day?
Thinking about my future as a product manager, it seemed clear to me that there are a wide range of exciting product challenges to tackle and that many successful consumer product companies are built on technologies other than Drupal. That’s not a knock against Drupal - Qualified Drupalists will readily admit that Drupal isn’t the right tool for every job.
Technology varies from product to product, but there’s a bit of a constant in many of the other skills associated with product management (eg, design, user research, solid understanding of engineering concepts etc). For me, Drupal was a powerful way to build my skill set as a software engineer, and offered me an early taste of product management as a project maintainer for software powering tens of thousands of individual websites, and on client projects at scale.I’m ready to work on an a new challenge, and as a frequent concert goer, SeatGeek is an extremely appealing opportunity.
I was already a user of the SeatGeek app before I joined the company. I was even more impressed when I spoke to members of the SeatGeek team. It’s immediately apparent that the SeatGeek folks are smart. Really smart. The company is nimble, and SeatGeek has a culture where where  “Red tape, office politics and buzzword-driven development are not allowed” and where “product is king.” This is not just lip service: When you use the SeatGeek iOS or Android apps or visit SeatGeek’s website, you’ll see that it’s extremely easy to find and compare deals on tickets to your favorite events.
This focus on product quality for end users has been rewarded in the company’s growth. SeatGeek did $115 million in ticket sales in 2014 and has raised $103 million in funding overall, with $97 million coming in through the last 12 months alone in B and C funding rounds. SeatGeek has also partnered with Telecharge to sell first-hand tickets to hundreds of Broadway and off-Broadway events.
Product quality comes from a skilled team making continuous improvements to their product and that’s clearly what’s going on at SeatGeek. I can’t wait to collaborate with and learn tons from the SeatGeek team as we make the product even better for end users.












