Solo Founder Development Sprint

A story about how Chris, the founder of Linode, started his cloud computing company in the early 2000s.

"In 2002-2003, Chris was working at a company called HealthStream in their tech department. He noticed hosting was really expensive, so he made a bold decision. He had a year's worth of savings and literally locked himself in his apartment to code and build this website. His mindset was simple: if it works, it works; if it doesn't, it doesn't.

Right away, the platform did well enough to pay his salary - making single-digit hundreds of thousands of dollars by year two. This was before Amazon Web Services was even around, or if it was, it was brand new. The whole idea of cloud computing was brand new.

The inspiration came from his time at HealthStream, where he thought 'we have to spend all this money to buy servers - what if we just bought a bunch of servers and rented them out to people?' It was solving a real problem for small businesses who didn't want to create their own servers in their office but needed to host websites and applications.

The company grew steadily year over year. Chris was obsessed with automation, which allowed them to maintain a small staff of only 10-15 people even when they were approaching $10 million in revenue. It was 100% self-financed - no loans, no outside investment. The business was highly profitable, making around $4 million in profit on $10 million in revenue."