The Story
Software was only part of the solution.
I’ve got a hammer
In 2012, Justin left the Computer Science PhD program at UC Berkeley to start this company. He set out to modernize the web hosting industry using his combined background as a security researcher, software engineer, and hosting industry veteran.
After a few years, multiple growing SaaS products, and an expanding team of engineers, his understanding of our customers’ problems changed. Where previously he readily ignored problems that couldn’t be solved through automation, he began to feel the weight of the naive blinders he’d been wearing. Our biggest customers had very hard and important problems that software alone couldn’t solve.
And I’ve got a bell
In 2020, Allison took over from Justin as CEO. As a married couple, they’d worked side by side from before the first software product was launched. For the first years, Allison’s medical case management business funded the company while she helped Justin navigate the CEO waters.
At around ten people, Justin’s brain didn’t have any energy left to focus on the company’s technology direction. The timing was right for Allison and Justin both. After a decade of running a successful medical case management company, the challenges Allison faced were rarely new or truly challenging. For twelve years before that, she’d been a high school AP chemistry teacher working with other educators to improve science education.
Since meeting as undergrads in 1996, Allison and Justin had dreamed of combining their skills. Justin is a specialist. Allison is a generalist. Justin understands how to organize code to solve problems. Allison understands how to organize people to solve problems.
Allison and Justin decided it was time to solve harder problems together than either one could solve on their own.
And I’ve got a song to sing
All over this land
With EarlyDog, we’re building and managing cloud infrastructure solutions for any situation our customers have. And we’re doing it in a way nobody’s done before: with a level of personalization unheard of in managed services. As this requires understanding and meeting the needs of unique business situations, there isn’t a single solution that’s ideal for everyone.
Solving hosting for complex situations requires a range of experienced engineers, from architects to developers to sysadmins, working together. Experts are needed not only when creating and deploying solutions, but also for ongoing monitoring requiring deep systems understanding and adapting to evolving situations as each customer’s needs change over time.
Beyond just technical expertise, members of our team must learn the unique situations of our customers and use their experience and judgement to solve new problems. Our engineers must collaborate with our customers and their development teams to bring our expertise into their organization.
We’re excited for our company’s biggest challenge: scaling our organization of world-class engineers that provide expert hosting solutions.
