A tree grows in Bellevue.
On the 13th floor of the Bank of America building, in a quiet room off the kitchen, a Monstera deliciosa grows.
Actually, to be fair – it’s exploding.
Office folklore says the growth of this plant is directly tied to the success of the business that hosts it – Smartsheet, today one of the largest privately held companies in Bellevue with over 400 employees.
The company started in 2005 as the brainchild of its four founders in a little yellow house on the Kirkland waterfront, with a tiny plant as a good luck charm. Their idea was deceptively simple: create a collaborative spreadsheet hosted in the web. The goal? Introduce a better way to work. But this was back before terms like “collaboration” or “cloud” were mainstream. Before the widespread acceptance of the “single-page application”, much less the frameworks to build one.
Todd Fasullo, Director of Engineering, remembers those days well. “EC2 didn’t exist, so we ran our test environments on a single Dell desktop computer we hosted ourselves. It was actually an old machine donated by our CEO’s parents. We amped up the memory to the breaking point, piled it high with disks, then made sure everybody kept their distance to avoid an accidental kick.”
This wasn’t the only tenuous scenario in the early days.
Our founding team often heard our goals were too lofty and could only be solved by the companies already providing the tools that “everybody used.” But that early team was tenacious and guess what – today Smartsheet is the work management platform trusted by more than half of the Fortune 500. We’re in our fifth consecutive year of 70% growth with millions of users in over 190 countries.
In fact, Smartsheet was recently recognized as a leader in Enterprise collaborative work management, a new technology market category that was far from existence back in 2005.
From our earliest beginnings to today, we’ve continued to hire folks with the same fire in their bellies (myself included) to build, sell, and market a product that changes the way organizations make things happen. In addition to tackling an audacious goal to change the nature of work, Smartsheet is routinely recognized as one of the best places to work in town including recent recognition from GeekWire as the region’s “Next Tech Titan”.
So what happened to that old desktop computer?
“Now, we run our lab/test environment across 50 servers, with more than a half-terabyte of memory,” says Fasullo. The needs of hosting spreadsheet data are complex and varied, involving Docker containers, Tomcat, MySQL, ElasticSearch, and a wide array of services written in Java on the server side, not to mention the huge investment in JavaScript for the web front-end, as well as Android and iOS for its mobile clients.
And Smartsheet is continuing to scale.
“Today we’re creating our own data center,” says Andy Lientz, SVP of Engineering. “We use the cloud for many operations, but our future growth and security requirements for customer data requires the kind of control only our own facility can give us.” So we’re building out data centers in Chicago and Virginia, selected specifically for their ability to support Smartsheet’s growing clientele in Europe and Asia as well as the folks here at home.
While it would be far-fetched to suggest that every startup that seeks to become the next Tech Titan should have a plant on its founder’s desk…
… it can’t hurt, right?
