2021 Year-End Update: A Letter from Syntropy CEO
Significant developments throughout 2021 have established a foundation for growth in the years ahead.
If you’re new to Syntropy, welcome. If you’re one of our many long-term community members, thanks again for your incredible support. With 2021 soon to be in the books, I’d like to provide a brief update highlighting all of the demanding work we put in over the past twelve months, including the tangible results we achieved that will fuel our progress in 2022 and beyond.
The year 2021 could be summarized as fundamental preparation for scaling our incredibly disruptive technology and business. Over the years of PoC and Pilot production stages with various companies, we built a solid business foundation and expert-level industry knowledge. At this point, we feel confident that Syntropy will handle the aggressive scaling, so the next obvious step is firing up the sales and marketing engines.
We envision 2022 as the year of real growth for Syntropy — the sales architecture, strong marketing department, solid technology, and funding makes us feel profoundly prepared for our moment. I sincerely believe that this will be our year. A year when Web3 will start taking off in a super big way. The network layer is a crucial element for Web3 to become a reality, and Syntropy is well-positioned to deliver that and become the leader in the Internet networking space.
People
In 2021, we massively grew our staff by over 100% as we assembled a team of industry leaders with proven success across critical parts of Syntropy. Organizations like ours need experienced veterans at the top and intelligent, forward-thinking staff throughout the rest of the workforce. It is a particular industry where barriers for entry are incredibly high, so the experience is crucial to success.
I am super proud and excited that we brought on people of such a high level to the team. Jeff Lacouture, who has a tremendous network sales background, including as Chief of Staff — AT&T at Cisco, and sales leadership roles at Forward Networks and Instabase, joined us as CRO. Kevin Gavin, who has extensive marketing background in early-stage category-creating companies, including 4 that had successful IPOs while he was an employee, joined us as CMO. Dinas Lipinskas joined as our Head of Talent Acquisition to help build the top quality team. New hires like Tim Murphy and Abdelrahman Omran also brought their valuable network and unique experience from AWS and Google to our sales and marketing teams.
The Syntropy strategic advisory board includes telecommunications and network industry luminaries who helped build the network services industry and are now deeply involved in assisting Syntropy to reshape that industry. These include Roman Pacewicz, the former head of strategy and Chief Product Officer at AT&T, Shawn Hackl, Microsoft VP of 5G and former Verizon SVP of Business Products, and Joe Weinman, a former executive at ATT, Hewlett Packard, and Telx. We are also fortunate to have blockchain and crypto expert Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer at Coinshares, on our strategic advisory board.
I am thrilled to have such a forward-thinking, passionate and harmonious team of co-workers and advisors dedicated to hard work and delivering outstanding results — our talent is second to none. We have assembled a powerful group of people ready to help Syntropy succeed, and we are planning to continue expanding the team in 2022.
Technology & Business
When it comes to delivering on tech milestones, we had one of our most successful years to date. The biggest focus in 2021 was to build out the technology platform to handle large production environments to support enterprise growth and developer adoption. I am very excited about the progress with Syntropy Stack, which is the gateway for companies and developers to start building on Syntropy technology.
Syntropy Stack
One of our biggest long-term goals is to make riding on the Syntropy network as easy as possible. We’ve delivered on this goal through the launch and refinement of Syntropy Stack. Hundreds of individual developers and several large organizations are now regularly using Syntropy Stack to manage networks, giving them a plug-and-play ability to route traffic over our network.
We did a bunch of integrations last year, and we continue adding them to show the vast potential of our tech stack becoming an integral part of almost every technology solution.
Enterprise Adoption
In my mid-year update, I was confident about having several enterprise customers onboarded by the end of 2021 and I am proud to report that we do have several large enterprises (including FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies), and some smaller ones onboard and using Syntropy to improve their network’s performance.
As is always the case with enterprises, they control what and when they choose to make the information public. We respect their privacy and treat their information confidential until they are ready to announce. We are more confident than ever that we will continue to add more enterprise customers in the months ahead and look forward to sharing many Customer Success Stories as individual customers decide to make their stories known publicly.
Having these early enterprise customers using the Syntropy network is incredibly important because it helps us validate the power of the Syntropy technology. Their real-world feedback helps us identify ways to refine, enhance, and scale the solution to better meet the needs of businesses as we onboard more enterprises in 2022.
Marketing
We are planning to dramatically increase our focus and investment in marketing in 2022. We have already made significant progress in building out our marketing team with the recent addition of Kevin Gavin as our new CMO and a few other key marketing hires. Our strategy is to focus on the three critical areas necessary to create a world-class marketing engine: product marketing, brand and buzz, and demand generation. Each area requires different expertise but they all come together in a fully integrated marketing program.
Product marketing is all about clear product messaging and compelling content creation. With Knyck Sutherland now leading Growth Marketing, we are building a serious content machine that will produce articles, white papers, explainer videos, Customer Success Stories, Syntropy Spotlight videos, webinars, podcasts, product release notes, and more. Our Writers Program already has over a dozen members of the community contributing articles. All the content will be easily accessible to the community via the Syntropy website.
Creating brand and buzz is critical to driving awareness. Telling a unique, consistent, and compelling story is the fundamental part of our marketing strategy. Next year, customers, partners, media, analysts, and investors will see with their own eyes that Syntropy is taking off as the network powering Web3.
In the end, the objective of all of the marketing activities is to generate demand for the product among enterprise customers to drive rapid growth. With experienced experts on board, we will be investing in search marketing, content syndication, paid sponsorships, trade shows, and conferences to generate demand. We will also be ramping up our Testers Program that has already had 73 applications approved and is becoming a great source of customer leads.
Community
Community is one of the main work areas for Syntropy in 2022. We genuinely see Syntropy as a community-enabled and community-governed project that has no other way but to become a real DAO going in the future. There are no doubts about this direction, and that is why 2022 should be a year for community communication, collaboration, involvement, and growth.
We have a solid commitment to increasing the team’s participation in the daily community discussions, doing more AMA’s, being more transparent, and most importantly, launching more ways for every community member to participate in helping this project reach its ultimate goal potential. Since our technology is becoming more and more open-source and is built on blockchain, community participation will powerfully expand. Everyone can run nodes, write code, become testers, refer the project to their friends, and be rewarded for all the input they make. This is a deep vision where every community member is a stakeholder, like every employee or co-founder.
Many of you have supported the project from the very start, and most of you have a genuine belief in Syntropy’s mission and the team’s dedication to it. We honor that with our full hearts and we’re ready to prove it.
Looking Ahead
Trust me, building technology that meets the network demands is a tough nut to crack, but that’s what we accomplished last year. Thousands of developers are now actively using our technology stack, with several deployments worldwide providing real-world validation of our tech to improve network performance for Web3.
We designed our technology intentionally to allow easy integration across even the largest organizations. In several cases, deployments were established in minutes. The path is now paved to bring the Web3 solutions to mainstream enterprise adoption.
Our ultimate goal is to create an open network where anyone, anywhere, can move their traffic onto the Syntropy network quickly and painlessly. As with other respected protocols like Ethereum or Bitcoin, permission will not be needed to take advantage of and contribute to our network. It will always be on, always available, and always ready to deliver on the world’s internet demands, both today and far into the future.
Based on the ongoing successes of our deployments, you can expect many more enterprises to move network traffic onto the Syntropy network in the future, both publicly and anonymously. I am looking forward to sharing some of our enterprise users’ greatest successes. Working directly with our team will not be required for adoption — anyone at any scale will be able to use our network at any time, unilaterally. That’s the beauty of blockchain technologies. That’s the beauty of Web3.
Thank you for being part of this journey, and I look forward to chatting with you on our Telegram Channel.
