CartoDB series B, some personal thoughts

What a ride!.

Since I joined CartoDB full-time, almost 2 years ago, months are running around me and I cannot avoid a certain dizziness, mixed with lots of excitement and some doses of panic.

We are overcoming milestones at an absurd pace, over 130.000 users, 1000 paying customers, 50 team members… And now, we enjoy another important moment in our short history, we just announced $23 million of new funding and what is more important, great new partners joining the CartoDB family: Accel Partners and Salesforce Ventures.

During our funding process we always stated that our main goal was to optimize for people, finding an awesome new board member and lead investor which would help and support us in this new phase, and we simply put Ciaran O’Leary from Earlybird, as a role model of how luckily successful we were in our series A last year.

Investors are crucial team members, and you need to find the right fit for the each phase of your startup. In our case, local investors, ready to take risks betting on people, were absolutely great for our starting steps, thank you Arrola and Aquilino!.

In October last year, with Ciaran, we added a smart, supportive, experienced and connected person on board, which is the phone number you call first when you have challenges and shit starts to hit the fan.

And now we felt the same chemistry with Harry Nelis from Accel, he is the kind of person who will remain calm during turbulences, sharing the right piece of advice with perfect timing. I am sure he will be paramount in helping us become a truly global enterprise SaaS player.

It will be hard to decide who will get the difficult calls from now on :).

CartoDB is not just an innovative location intelligence platform. Technology matters, indeed, but we are, moreover, a community. Our hard-working team members, our enthusiastic power users, the groups of journalists, financial services analysts, biodiversity experts, educators, big data scientists…, who use us daily and gather together to share experiences and become better mappers and location data analysts are the reason we built CartoDB in the first place.

I am extremely thankful to all of you, and especially to the families of our team members, to my own patient family ;)!, for their incredible support and understanding.

It is really inspiring to see how each of the members of the community has a unique way of telling the stories that really matter, providing information for better decision making and coming up with innovative ideas on how we can provide a better service.

I experience, proudly envious, how, week over week, each team member is growing and learning how to punch way over his weight, from our CEO, Javier, who gets the hard thing about hard things ;); Sergio, who does magic defining the product every day; Andrew, who equally innovates relentlessly and excites communities worldwide; to Santana, keeping our feet on the ground while delivering dreams with daily production deployments.

Our roadmap is full of new exciting paths to explore, we are eager to bring incredibly talented individuals from all over the globe on board and be closer to where our customers and users are in over 65 countries. The new funding we have secured will help us to achieve all this, to create a better CartoDB.

It is a privilege to be able to live these times, with these top tier partners, incredible team and top-notch technology. I am grateful for the opportunity and of course, frightened about the responsibility. We have a grand vision and now we need to execute and deliver to the expectations.

Scaling up a startup is actually not about doing many more things, but about focusing on the crucial issues and challenges you are facing every day. Doing less but better, and spending wisely, ambitiously but without extravagances.

We are just getting started, we need to prove that we deserve the attention and the resources we got so far and we have a long way and extreme effort ahead of us, before we can call it a day.

But it is also important to celebrate the milestones, enjoy the path and be humble to recognize how big the role is, that luck plays in all this game.

Thank you for your support!.

Stay tuned for more awesomeness coming from the CartoDB team!

P.s.- More info about the announcement can be found here:

http://blog.cartodb.com/announcement-seriesb/