Greta is no more. Here’s why.
A few months ago me and my two co-founders Dennis and Victor came to the decision to stop building Greta.
The irony is that if we had been able to get a preview of the 6 months leading up to this decision back when we started out, we would probably have jumped with pride and excitement. Things were finally falling into place, and it felt like the world was moving our way; we onboarded more and bigger users, we had interest from some of the worlds’ largest media and retail companies, we joined the amazing Heavybit community. We were offered additional financing by amazing investors, and we had built a fantastic team that made it a true joy to work. The product got praise, we were listed as one of the hottest startups by Wired, we got on the radar of some of the world’s most accomplished minds in the infrastructure space who offered to help in different ways, and we were making progress in a higher pace than ever. After two years of what felt like pushing a heavy snowball up a mountain; we were finally over the edge and things felt easy (well, easier…).
One thing that I have learned about having cofounders is that you over time develop an almost joint sense of intuition. Before you have all data, before you have articulated arguments, before you have said things out loud; there is this ungraspable notion of something deep down — and at least for me, Dennis and Victor we’ve more often than not become aware of that notion’s existence at roughly the same time.
This was no exception, and one sunny San Francisco afternoon we dared to articulate it; deep down something didn’t feel right.
When we started Greta we promised each other one critical thing; to never build a company just for the sake of building a company. The purpose of Greta was to make a positive impact for Internet users globally, and if we one day felt that we wouldn’t be able to have the degree of impact that we wanted, we’d prefer to quit. The thought that we now dared to articulate was; “is this that day?”.
When we started Greta we had three fundamental hypothesis around the continued development of Internet infrastructure;
- There would be a focus shift from hardware to software as ML/AI technology significantly improves the ability to use available network and client data intelligently to optimize performance.
- There would be endless opportunities in fast growing countries like India where the demand for content consumption would require fundamentally new ways of delivering Internet content.
- Companies with heavy content would opt for 3rd party options rather than building in-house solutions, and favour easy-to-use developer platforms that left them in control.
At this sunny afternoon, we concluded that all of these hypothesis had proven true. However, this also meant that the playfield now looked significantly different than when we started. Amazon is investing massively in its cloud and infrastructure businesses, Google is rolling out impressive projects like Google Station and Youtube Go in India as part of its Next Billion Users initiatives, and keep on developing infrastructure projects like Espresso. Impressive companies like Fastly and Cloudflare are challenging how developers think about content delivery and edge cloud capacity. In this new playfield, we no longer truly believed that Greta would have the ability to be the company pushing the boundaries of Internet performance. Could it become a financially successful company? Without a doubt. Was it still in line with the promise we made to each other when we started it? No.
The discussions that followed with the rest of the team, investors, advisors and other people that had helped us along the way obviously weren’t easy, but everyone agreed that if we no longer felt that we could truly have the big impact that we wanted, letting go was the right thing to do. We’ve been extremely fortunate to surround Greta with incredibly intelligent, kind and respectful people, and I’m truly overwhelmed by the support we’ve received.
Since the decision to stop working on Greta we’ve all taken some much needed time to reflect on our own individual goals and dreams, and we’re all incredibly excited about what’s next. For some of us; myself, my cofounder Dennis and our first hire Pierre-Louis, the decision has landed on joining the amazing team at Fastly. Since we started Greta we’ve not only been impressed by their ability to build high-performing technology, but also the incredible people we’ve met there; people with high integrity, tons of knowledge and a good portion of humor.
Their journey so far is breathtakingly impressive; they’re one of the top 10 fastest growing B2B tech companies of the last 30 years with customers like The New York Times, AirBnB, Spotify, The Guardian, Firebase, Etsy, Twitter, Github and many more, and today serves over 10% of all Internet requests. We’re super excited to join their team, and look forward to keep working towards the purpose we had from day 1; improving Internet experiences for users globally.
The last years have been extremely rewarding; and me, Dennis and Victor are incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished. The strongest feeling of them all is how grateful we are for all the amazing people we’ve been fortunate enough to get to know, and we’re of course especially grateful towards those who decided to join Greta’s mission in different ways — you are the best!
The amazing amazing Greta team, our users, the brilliant Jason Whitmire at BlueYard and our other investors Hampus Jakobsson, Sophia Bendz, Jan Erik Solem, Jeremy Yap, Erik Byrenius, Anna Nordell, Stefan Lindeberg, Anders Frankel, Marcus Wallén, Alfred Ruth, Tommy Andersen and Tim Jackson, the entire Heavybit team and community, as well as people like Serge LaChapelle, Niklas Zennström, Chad Fowler, Ameet Patel, Jonathan Heiliger, David Roldan, Gus Maskowitz, Daniel Bergqvist and many many more who’ve generously shared their time, input and help.
