The internet is forever, but our devices aren’t!

With the entirety of our lives slowly being digitized, it’s brought new considerations on keeping data safe. A single drive crashing can be the equivalent of a massive house fire causing irreparable damage to your information, losing large amounts of data. Yet, the majority of people still fail to back up their electronic devices.

The founders of Backblaze noticed this and set off to fix this problem by creating an easy and convenient way to store data. Backblaze hopes to provide users with easy disaster recovery if something unfortunate did happen.

The company has a large team behind it with seven founders - Tim Nufire, Gleb Budman, Brian Wilson, Nilay Patel, Casey Jones, Damon Uyeda, and Billy Ng - all working on different aspects to create the best product.

Stick around to read all about this story, involving an inspiring amount of hard work, dedication, and passion, culminating with the great success of Backblaze.

Not Everyone Hates Math

Our founders are all highly enthusiastic about technology and always have been. It certainly helped them break out and make it in an industry so competitive. Their interest in the field, paired with their innovation, talent, and tech skills created the perfect environment for the birth and prosperity of Backblaze.

All seven founders were already working in the same field and on similar ideas to one another. In fact, they’d worked together in one way or another for over 20 years. It makes perfect sense, then, that when put together they’d turn around and develop something brilliant.

Before they founded Backblaze and became a part of its devoted team, all of the co-founders had a rich history of work in the tech industry.

Let’s Get to Work!

Tim enrolled in the University of Kansas in 1983, choosing to do a bachelor's degree in mathematics. Tim excelled during his time there and 4 years later graduated with the highest distinctions. Tim’s first job out of university was as a software engineer at Pharos Technologies.

Tim would go on to later hold other engineering positions at Apple and Adobe, and further on work as a director at Mail Frontier and Search Fox, and as VP of engineering at Aplia. As of 2008, Tim is the chief cloud officer at Backblaze.

Gleb earned his B.S. and later on his M.B.A. in mechanical engineering from Berkeley University. While still studying he founded and successfully exited two other start-ups. By the time he graduated he was already prepared for the world of tech entrepreneurship.

Gleb worked as senior marketing manager at Kendara, vice president of products at MailFrontier, and senior director at SonicWall. In Backblaze, Gleb takes on the role of chief executive officer, along with serving as a board member since 2009, and as chairperson as of 2021.

Brian studied at Oregon State University where he got a B.S. in engineering physics and computer science. He then went on to earn an M.S. in computer science from Stanford. Brian has held senior positions at Kendara, Apple, and Silicon Graphics.

Brian also has some start-up experience under his belt having co-founded MailFrontier and successfully seeing it through to acquisition. At Backblaze, Brian works as CTO and is a board member.

Nilay got his degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. His work prior to Backblaze shaped his current expertise in development and sales. Nilay held jobs at MailFrontier and later at SonicWALL after their acquisition of the former.

In 2006, Nilay became the first Electric Cloud employee in Europe, working on signing up new customers including big names such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Philips, and others. After co-founding Backblaze, Nilay becomes the company’s sales VP and is key in launching Backblaze Business Backup, which allowed businesses to backup employee computers.

In early 2011, Nilay leaves the company to co-found another start-up - Selligy aimed to help sales development teams reach higher conversion rates. Selligy was acquired by Veeva Systems in 2015, and a few months late, Nilay returned to his previously-held position at Backblaze.

Casey attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he got a degree in Economics. He started out developing event sites for companies, and would later lead web design and user interface at MailFrontier and Kendara. Since 2007, Casey has been VP of Design at Backblaze.

Billy earned a Bachelor’s degree in computer information systems from Hawaii Pacific University. He held a few jobs in engineering, serving as lead engineer at Excite@Home, MailFrontier, and later SonicWALL. Since the foundation of Backblaze, he has taken on the duty of server architect and mentor for the Engineering team.

Damon had held senior technical positions at Excite@Home, Oracle, and three different startups prior to his time as a founder. In Backblaze, he became the Mac architect, and thanks to his innovation, skill, and dedication, the company developed the product for Mac users superbly.

A New Start(up)

Working in the field, Brian, like many others, helped his less tech-savvy friends and family with their electronics. On one occasion he would get a call from one of those friends, but this time, Brain was unable to help.

His friend’s computer had crashed and she had no backup of her data. This was surprising to someone like Brian, but to most, it isn’t that surprising at all. The majority of people simply didn’t do that.

Brian went around asking people if they backed up data. He also asked his colleagues and future co-founders, and they all turned around to ask others. Soon, all of them found out there was a massive issue to be solved! With many of the founders already being seasoned entrepreneurs, they went to look for the solution.

It seemed at first, that Backblaze was late to the show - there already existed plenty of backup options. Yet, with people still not using them, there was obviously a need to improve on the current solutions and offer a better alternative.

And that alternative would be Backblaze.

The founders all invested not only their time and effort into this project, but their own money, too. The youngsters worked on the project from a one-bedroom Palo Alto apartment for over three years.

When considering threats to a company, you could name many things, but in 2011, Backblaze would be endangered by something no one could have seen coming.

In October of that year, Thailand was violently flooded. This seems inconsequential for the US-based company. However, as it turns out, factories in Thailand produced nearly 50% of all hard drives - factories that were now damaged by the floods.

Now, not only had the price of internal drives tripled but they were getting bought out by larger companies. Luckily, Backblaze’s team had a genius solution to this. They used external hard drives instead. Even though it required them to be removed from the case, it was still the cheaper and more available option.

Since they were in the midst of the Thailand crisis, retailers limited the number of hard drives you could buy per person. So, the founders enlisted everyone they could to gather up drives. They called it “drive farming”.

After continuously hearing that backing up is too difficult and too expensive, the team created a product that solved both these problems for consumers.

The determined and skilled entrepreneurs showed that they could weather any storm, and expanded from selling backup software to now offering cloud storage services.

Standing on Solid Financial Ground

Backblaze has had three funding rounds - a seed round, a venture round, and most recently, a Series A in 201, which raised $5.3 million. The company is funded by 2 investors: TMT Investments and Ulrich Gall.

After a while in the industry, Backblaze decided it was high time to go public. On November 11th, 2021, Backblaze had its initial public offering, with their stock opening with $16.00 under the ticker NASDAQ: BLZE.

As with any startup, beginnings are tough. No matter how brilliant your idea is, it’s still destined to meet some fierce competition, making it hard to keep your head above water. Today, Backblaze is standing tall with competitors like Acronis Cyber Backup, Veeam Backup &Replication, and OneDrive, among others.

Back(up) To The Future

Backblaze continues to make strides in storage and backup services from its San Mateo headquarters. The founding team seems intent on going forward at full speed.

Today, there are more than 160 employees at Backblaze, all doing their best for providing the ultimate service to their clients.

After the company’s IPO, it’s able to invest in the development of its current projects - the Storage Cloud platform and the B2 Cloud Storage. While Backblaze had already helped around 500,000 customers, the company will be able to expand its market even further by increasing sales and marketing efforts.

After 14 years of prospering in the data storage market, Backblaze remains at the forefront of innovation, while staying true to its initial goal throughout - simple and affordable data storage consumers can trust!