Startup to NASDAQ: My Telerik Journey
April 2019 marks my final month at Telerik (now Progress).
For the last decade(+), I’ve been part of an amazing journey serving one of the hardest customer groups on the planet: software developers. I’ve had titles ranging from “Technical Evangelist” to “Chief Evangelist” to “EVP Cross-Platform Tools & Services.” I’ve criss-crossed the globe, traveling over 1/2 million miles in the sky. And I’ve made some incredible friendships working remotely with a team scattered between the US, Canada, UK, India, Australia and, of course, Bulgaria.
On this, my 12-year anniversary, it is time to move on to new challenges (more on that at the end), but before the memories fade, let me recap my Telerik journey. A journey that changed my life.
A Customer First
My journey at Telerik began on the outside, as a customer.
Shortly before graduating from Texas A&M University (WHOOP!), I started to work on what we’d today call a “software startup.” Back in 2005, we lacked the glamorous startup scene that exists now — there were no incubators, or Everything-as-a-Service, or GitHub to help get everything up and running in a click…it was the dark ages.
Still, a close friend and I worked towards building a company (Strategy10) that would provide web-based software for managing career fairs (CareerFair LIVE).
It may seem at first an odd focus, but the Texas A&M Business Student Council, of which I was VP and President for a time, happened to run one of the nation’s largest student-run career fairs. Every semester, the Business Student Council would work like a well-oiled machine to process hundreds of registrations and hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies interested in recruiting at Mays Business School. It is here that I got introduced to web programming for the first time (ASP “Classic”), and where I began to rewrite the career fair’s software for processing and managing registrations with a shiny new technology called “ASP.NET 2.0.”
When I graduated, I did what “responsible” people do and took a job at USAA, a Fortune 200 financial services and insurance company in San Antonio. It was good exposure to giant enterprise business, but it didn’t capture my heart. I continued to toil away on CareerFair LIVE on lunch breaks and at night. In fact, I can clearly remember lunch breaks sitting in my ’95 4Runner, used ThinkPad from TigerDirect in my lap, tapping out the VB.NET (don’t judge) to advance our app.
As our app advanced, the need for more powerful UI became clear. This was 2005, AJAX was still a relatively new technology and IE6 was still a very real browser. We needed help to move fast.
So…I borrowed $1k from my dad and bought the Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET.
Forums and Free iPods
As I worked more with the Telerik tools in CareerFair LIVE, I spent A LOT of time in the product forums. I found that answering forum questions from other people helped me improve my understanding of how the tools worked, and helped me fill the mind numbing hours in my enterprise cubicle. (You can only invent so much work for yourself at an entry level enterprise job before your mind wanders.)
Telerik forums at that time had a featured “Top Poster” of the month, and I began to work fast and hard to claim that spot. There was no prize, but I liked the idea that I was helping a lot of people on their journey with these controls that I loved using, too.
Then, one day, a mysterious package showed up at my house, with Telerik-branded swag and an iPod mini (iPhone was still a couple years away).
This unexpected gift came courtesy of the Telerik crew as a thanks for my active contributions. It was completely unexpected, and it was one of my first introductions to the special nature of this company. It was a spirit of generosity that would repeat in the years ahead, and something I most admired about the original culture at Telerik.
As the months went on, more iPods showed up and I continued to stay active in the Telerik forums while developing CareerFair LIVE. I became part of the early “Telerik MVP” crew, and eventually realized this company was based in Bulgaria (something that took WAY longer to discover than it should have).
In October 2006, inspired by the blogging styles of Engadget and WinSuperSite (who at the time was tracking the Windows Longhorn train wreck), I decided to start a blog focused on Telerik: TelerikWatch.com.
I was frequently answering the same questions in the Telerik forums, especially about release dates (which would often change in those days with little communication), so I figured a blog would be a good way to share that knowledge (remember: no Twitter at this time, either). If Paul Thurott could make a name being the blogger covering Windows, I figured I’d shoot to do the same for Telerik.
Then an email arrived. It was from Telerik co-founders, Vassil and Svetozar (Zarko), asking if I’d fly to Tulsa to deliver a session about Telerik at the Tulsa TechFest.
A Presentation to One
At this point in time, I’d never been to a developer conference, let alone presented at one. But I was young and dumb, and had little fear of public speaking, so I figured, how hard could it be?
I worked over the next few weeks practicing a session Telerik had already prepared: “Load-on-demand, Easy as 1–2–3” (or something like that). This was again pre-AJAX popularity, but the session basically showed how Telerik UI tools for ASP.NET made it easy to do AJAX “load on demand” actions.
I practiced on my own. I did virtual run-thrus with Vassil Petev and Ivo Nedkov in Sofia. And then I boarded the flight to Tulsa. (All of this in the nights and weekends around my “real job” at USAA.)
In Tulsa, I stumbled around my first TechFest. Markus Egger was keynoting. In the speaker lounge I bumped in to a couple of jovial guys I’d never heard of, Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin. (Ironically, they had just returned from a trip to Sofia to participate in Telerik’s DevReach event.) And then I looked for the room where I’d be presenting.
On the agenda, my session (a late addition) was listed as:
Todd Anglin
Telerik
Not much to go on, especially when competing with at least six other parallel sessions, but what did I know? It was my first conference.
I found my room. I set up my (still used) ThinkPad notebook. I connected the projector. And I waited for the room to fill up with people eager to learn about “Todd Anglin: Telerik.”
One person showed up. A second came later, but left.
I’d say it was a humbling experience, but I had no reference point. I was just excited to be there, talking about Telerik at an event. I made the most of the rest of my time at the conference and then caught a flight back to Texas.
When I got home, I sent an email to the Telerik founders thanking them for the opportunity and ending with a phrase that would change the next decade of my life, “We should do this again sometime…”
Telerik, Inc is Born
To my surprise, Telerik agreed. We should do it again sometime. In fact, we should do it all the time.
In November 2006, we started to talk about a permanent position at the company. At this point, there was no “Telerik” entity in the US. It was just one person (a friend of the founders, Dimitre) in Newton, MA operating the US outpost for Telerik out of his apartment as “Kirelet, Inc” (Telerik backwards). Much of our early dialog was discussing what a real Telerik, Inc in the US should look like if I were to leave my stable Fortune 200 job to join this venture.
Again, the generous company culture that put iPods on my doorstep revealed itself, and we ended up creating a US benefits package that matched and exceeded what USAA offered (and USAA was fairly generous by big US enterprise standards).
People first. This place was special.
My only other lingering concern was whether or not there would be enough work for me at Telerik. It’s silly in hindsight, but with little expectations of what being a “Technical Evangelist” would entail, I even negotiated the ability to keep working on CareerFair LIVE as part of my Telerik job (it was built with Telerik tools, after all).
Speaking of which, CareerFair LIVE was still budding in the background. We had our first few customers and were starting to reach the point where it was going to take full-time focus from at least one co-founder to continue growing. So beyond leaving USAA, I also had to choose if now was the right time to push an early phase startup ahead, or join a slightly more established startup and learn some valuable lessons for future gigs (this all obviously being pre- startup accelerators and incubators that can offer some of that education today).
Needless to say, CareerFair LIVE was put on hold, and I made plans to join the freshly minted “Telerik Inc” in the US. I officially joined at the beginning of February 2007.
Telerik Phase I: .NET Boom
My career at Telerik roughly fits in to four phases, plus a final fifth phase at Progress. The first phase was all .NET.
Microsoft’s .NET platform was rocking-and-rolling by 2007. .NET 2.0 was all the rage, and ASP.NET WebForms was hot. A new framework from Microsoft codenamed “Atlas” was bringing AJAX to ASP.NET, and with it Telerik’s first (of eventually four, and counting) rewrites of its primary web UI product (RadControls “Prometheus”).
Telerik was also on the verge of becoming a multi-product company. So far, ASP.NET web controls were the product. In 2007, desktop UI for WinForms and Telerik Reporting would join the portfolio, kicking-off what would become something of a portfolio arms race as Telerik competed fiercely for market share with other .NET UI and tool vendors. By 2010, three years later, there were more than 10 separate products in the Telerik toolbox.
My role in these days was all evangelism. Creating presentations, doing release webcasts (with bits you got hours before showtime), traveling to user groups and community events, staffing (and assembling) booths at trade shows and growing a team of evangelists to cover the rapidly growing portfolio. We were everywhere helping put the Telerik name on the map.
At some point, I was “promoted” to Chief Evangelist. I think it happened when Co-CEO Vassil simply referred to me that way in a press interview, and the new title stuck. For better or worse, that’s how many of my promotions occurred over the years. Little fanfare, just a new title and new responsibilities. I didn’t mind. Results always mattered more than title.
I have great memories from this time visiting code camps and conferences around the world. From places near, like Houston TechFest and South Florida Code Camp, to very far, like the Great Indian Developer Summit in Bangalore, India, or DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria. Over my years at Telerik, I’ve had the privilege to see a lot of the globe, and I’ve been to Sofia more times that I can count. Beautiful country. You should go.
Telerik Phase II: Kendo UI
By 2010, I’d been doing the .NET scene for a while, and was starting to wonder if Telerik could reach a wider audience. We had evolved our web UI products with ASP.NET MVC to the point that the .NET didn’t seem like a requirement, so why not take our amazing JavaScript UI and make it work for any web developer?
Turns out, the lead engineer (who is now running a cool startup called RadZen) for our ASP.NET MVC product was already thinking along similar lines, and so was born the early work on Kendo UI.
To succeed, we knew Kendo UI had to be different. It had to have its own identity and speak with its own voice if it was going to appeal beyond the traditional .NET/Telerik audience. I was tapped to lead this effort as “VP for HTML5 Web & Mobile Tools.”
We built an amazing team around Kendo UI. I recruited Brandon Satrom from Microsoft to come to Telerik and help establish the PM discipline. I recruited Burke Holland to join and take our “developer relations” (“evangelism” is no longer the en vogue term) game to the next level. And several other internal rockstars (for lack of a better term) joined as we set out to reach new customers in the vast HTML5/JavaScript landscape.
Kendo UI was a distinct “startup within a startup.” It was a fresh adventure in my time at Telerik, and it stands out as one of the most productive and impactful periods of work during my time here. A case study for how a small group of focused professionals can move faster and do more than larger teams in established organizations.
Somewhere in this period, I also helped open the Telerik Houston Office, so we could begin hiring additional people in Texas. The office eventually closed when I moved to California, but it was another unique learning experience to deal with corporate real estate brokers, office logistics and pros/cons of “traditional” office space.
While the office was small, I remember spending hours in that place talking to the press and analysts on the phone, recording videos on a makeshift green screen (sadly…fortunately?…most of those videos were pre-YouTube and lost to history) and assembling enough Ikea furniture to make me a certified expert. Looking at you FJÄLLBO.
Telerik Phase III: Telerik Platform
Kendo UI was by all accounts a massive success. We never quite cracked the PHP or Java/JSP developer audiences to the same level we did with .NET, but it didn’t matter. Developers were actively shifting away from server-side programming to client-side frameworks like AngularJS, and then in turn to Kendo UI, making it our fastest growing product to date.
At this point, Telerik was looking for a “big win” to reach its next growth milestone. The founders (and investors) were starting to look for the path to either A) an IPO, or B) a new round of funding to further accelerate growth.
Mobile app dev was still nascent, so it seemed like a good place to focus to continue to expand our reach while moving-in to a space poised to grow rapidly in the enterprise. We had a number of scattered efforts in play by 2012/2013 — Icenium, Everlive, Kendo UI Mobile — but we decided we needed a sticky “Platform™”.
Coming off the success of Kendo UI, I was asked to help drive this new initiative forward as “EVP Cross-Platform Tools & Services.”
Unlike Kendo UI, where we had a small, focused team working on a greenfield product, Telerik Platform was a bit more…unwieldy. It was trying to integrate products built by several different teams (including one acquisition), and it was piled with people to try to do a lot in a short time.
At the same time, we’d reached the point in our company evolution where more “outside” managers had joined to help us get to that next elusive growth milestone. These managers brought with them new obsessions with Gartner and Forrester analyst reports, constant chatter about building tools for “the enterprise,” and habits from working at other larger enterprise software companies (some good, some bad).
All of this converged to create a challenging environment for building a great product. Many cooks in the kitchen. Many different points of view about what we were building. And never growing fast enough to reach our arbitrary growth deadlines.
As phases in my Telerik career, this one was bittersweet.
The product did okay, but didn’t do nearly as well as Kendo UI, and the team never quite gelled as well. But it taught me important lessons, both about pricing and selling SaaS software and about the perils of building large teams too fast, especially without a shared vision for success.
During this time, my family moved to Mountain View, California, working out of Telerik’s “IPO office” in Palo Alto. It was a neat experience, but it’s also where it became clear the original Telerik energy, after 12 years, was fading.
Progress Acquisition
That would all change with the acquisition by Progress.
Progress, itself looking for a strategy to renew growth and excited by the innovation and energy of Telerik, acquired the company in 2014. The event made the Telerik founders independently wealthy, and for many of the other early Telerikers it was a big reward for the years of hard work.
As a public company, Progress was a new classroom for learning how mature software companies run. Over the four years I’ve spent at Progress, I’ve learned many things about how public investor relations work, and how public companies struggle to balance the desires of the Street with the internal R&D goals.
During this stint, I found myself in a New York ballroom presenting the Progress story to a room full of Wall Street investors, and even had the chance to join the NASDAQ bell ringing ceremonies in Time Square.
Progress was not the same fun, high-energy environment as Telerik, but it taught me invaluable things Telerik “the startup” never could. I’m glad I stayed on after the acquisition and did it.
Telerik Phase IV: NativeScript, Open Source & GM
As we approach the end of this journey, I returned to a period of amazing growth and productivity. Through all of my years working on developer products at Telerik, I’d never really had the chance to help an open source project succeed. That changed with NativeScript.
The third “startup” in my time at Telerik, NativeScript was a chance to learn what it takes to transform a solid technical solution in to a massively popular open source project with a flourishing community.
In the early days of internal NativeScript development, before it had a name and long before it was public, I was a skeptic. The technology didn’t seem “innovative enough” — there were, after all, other attempts to solve the cross-platform app dev problem with JavaScript — and neither Progress nor Telerik had demonstrated any aptitude for building a real, sustainable open source project.
The project pushed ahead, though, and with increased focus on maximizing the skill reuse for web developers, it become something special and I became its chief cheerleader.
Much like Kendo UI back in 2010, we assembled a small, crack team and gave it a laser-focus to drive this product forward. We even created a “NativeScript Strategic Adoption Team” (“NSAT”…the world has enough “SWAT” teams) that obsessed over how we could build a better product and better open source community.
It seemed impossible at the time to drive the level of growth that would put NativeScript on the map, but the growth came and continues to accelerate. When we started, NativeScript was downloaded 3600 times a month. Today, it’s downloaded more than 360k times per month! In 2018, it was downloaded nearly 2.9 million times, and in early 2019 it has already been downloaded another 1.2 million times. Needless to say, this was another highlight in my journey.
As NativeScript gained momentum, I spent the later part of 2016 taking my accumulated knowledge of all facets related to running a developer tools business and began to transition in to a “Co-GM” role with Marina Hristova (now at AppDynamics). This stint forced me back in to the deep analysis of business metrics, which is admittedly not my favorite activity, but was a good opportunity to use my experience working across Product Marketing, Product Management, Developer Relations and Product Strategy to help improve the efficiency of our mature developer business.
Progress Phase V: One More for the Road
Lots of change continued to define my post-acquisition time at Progress.
Over four years I had seven different bosses. During this period, virtually the entire C-suite turned over, and with that change, the company strategy and priorities shifted. Normal stuff for a public company. For the most part, I continued to focus on making an impact with NativeScript and the Telerik Developer Tools business, but in 2018 I decided to embark on one more new adventure.
As part of the new CEO’s strategy, several companies were acquired in 2017, including a mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) called Kinvey. By early 2018, there was a desire to more deeply integrate Kinvey with NativeScript and look for new ways to unlock growth with developers. Given my time and success with NativeScript, I was asked to lead the global product organization to make this happen.
Unique to this role was the challenge of integrating a sizable engineering team in the US (that came to Progress via the Kinvey acquisition) with the sizable engineering teams in Sofia. I learned a lot in a short time about how to keep large, globally dispersed teams aligned and executing towards a common goal, and got another crash course in selling (and supporting) mission critical SaaS (or PaaS) products.
These teams continue to work hard to deliver on the ambitious goals we’ve set, but I’m happy to leave with the knowledge that the teams know how to plan together, how to resolve disputes, and how to deliver amazing software.
Just the Hits
When I step back and reflect on all I’ve done and seen over the last twelve years, it’s still hard for me to believe. When I joined this small Bulgarian company in 2007, I never imagined it would take me to the meeting rooms of Hong Kong, to sharing a stage with Mythbuster’s Grant Imahara or sitting front-row to Steve Ballmer’s infamous MacBook Air mockery.
The adventures and stories accumulated over the last decade will last a lifetime, and yet there are decades more adventure to come.
Telerik was never perfect, but it was special. The people and culture made it special. And I hope I have the opportunity to recreate that at companies — new or established — in the future.
After all, we spend a large part of our adult lives at work. As leaders, we should aspire to make work a place that people feel secure, connected, valued and encouraged to take risks and do their best work. Telerik co-founder Vassil Terziev felt so strongly about this that he banned the term “human resources.” They are not “resources,” he insisted. They are people. They are the true capital of the business. To this day, as a result of the Telerik acquisition, Progress does not have “HR”, it has “HC” — Human Capital.
Life After Telerik: What’s Next?
Starting very soon, I will be joining Microsoft to work on the Azure team. The Azure Cloud Developer Advocacy team, specifically.
Needless to say, years of working closely with Microsoft as a partner at Telerik helped forge many of the relationships that led to this change, and I’m thrilled to work with an amazingly talented team at Microsoft to help accelerate the next wave of app development on the cloud (on Azure). The last phase in my journey at Progress taught me that while I enjoy the challenges of leading product organizations, I still have a passion developer advocacy and working very closely with developer communities. This is a new chance to apply lessons learned at Telerik over the years to developer advocacy challenges at Microsoft scale.
I’d be remiss not to mention how much life changed for me over the course of this journey. From the time I joined Telerik, my wife and I have added two beautiful daughters to our family (now 8 and 2), we’ve moved 5 times (around Texas and to California and back), my wife put a 7th grade math teaching career on pause (to spend more time with our daughters), and we’ve been financially successful to levels we never expected when we got married. To say it has been life changing is an understatement, and it all started with a passion for a product, that became a “presentation to one,” that became an unbelievable career.
It’s impossible to fully predict how the next steps in my journey will play out, but what I do know is that I’ll take a decade’s worth of amazing experiences, far-flung friendships and life lessons in to it. I’m excited to tackle the new challenges that lie ahead, and will remember fondly the adventure Telerik has been.
