The (Little) Company That Saved the World (Online)
To know a hard drive is to fear its death. For Brian Wilson, programmer, the affliction was a familiar one. Among friends and relatives, he was the go-to IT guy (the “family geek,” as he puts it), and he was used to getting calls about their tech problems—the big, the small, the stupid. Or, as on a morning in late 2006, when he heard from Lise, a childhood friend and skiing buddy, calls of total panic.
“It’s all gone!” she said, barely pausing to say hello. “My computer crashed. I lost everything! Can you help me get my data back?”
“Do you have a backup?” he asked.
“Brian, I don’t need a lecture. I need my data!”
Wilson always marvelled at his friends’ carelessness. He preserved three copies of his files at all times: on his PC’s hard drive, on Blu-ray discs in his closet, and on a second set of discs that he mailed to his brother’s house in case his own house caught fire. Doing otherwise was nuts.
After Wilson helped Lise as best he could (she’d synced her iTunes wrong and her music had vanished), he kept thinking how preventable such fiascoes ought to be. Why wasn’t there a simple way for regular folks to back up their data? It seemed like an easy business opportunity. Better yet, it might be just the thing that Wilson, a retiree at the age of 39, needed to fix his life.
The year before, Wilson’s first company, a venture-backed maker of spam-filtering software called MailFrontier, had been sold to a competitor, SonicWall, for $31 million. The deal, which netted him about $1 million, left him feeling wealthy but guilty. After guaranteed payments to the venture capitalists, not much was left for anyone but the founders; early employees got barely enough to pay for a mountain bike.
Wilson was feeling lonely, too. He’d used his payout to quit working and adopt a personal finance philosophy known as lean FIRE (that’s “financial independence retire early,” on a budget). Yet after seven months of motorcycle rides and ski trips, punctuated by interminable afternoons channel surfing and playing World of Warcraft in his Palo Alto, California, one-bedroom, he was desperate for something to do.
Lise’s call gave him a project. Wilson’s idea was to take advantage of two prevailing trends in tech. By 2007, almost half of the American population had broadband connections, and data storage was cheaper than ever. A year earlier, Amazon had introduced Amazon Web Services, which for a monthly fee handled all aspects of data storage from managing system traffic to maintaining the hardware. Wilson would piggyback on Amazon with an app that automatically uploaded users’ files to a secure AWS server over the internet. Back when he was a freelance software developer, he had named his one-man outfit Codeblaze; he’d call this one Backblaze—for backup.
Thirteen intense years later, his little company is humming along with a staff of 133, including more than a dozen with post graduate degrees in computer science, math, and business. With Backblaze, Wilson and a crew of scrappy
