We really appreciate the efforts of everyone at Engine Yard and we'd like to help provide opportunities for people we've let go, so we've set up an email alias for former Engine Yard employees and contractors.

This alias is opt-in, meaning that it goes to former Engine Yard people who told our HR department that they want to be included.

If you're interested in communicating with anyone in the group, just send an email to the following alias. Those who opted in will receive your email and reply if they're interested.

_alumni (at) engineyard (dot) com_

Thanks!

— Lance

I was on our weekly customer call this morning and I heard directly from customers that we haven't done the best job of communicating some changes that happened earlier this week at Engine Yard.

First, let me apologize for this. We've tried to be open about important things, but sometimes it's not always clear how much or how little detail is right.

To our customers, partners, and the Ruby and Rails communities at large, I want to reassure you that we are financially very sound and we intend to be here for years and years.

Our new CEO and everyone at Engine Yard are making the company better and making our long-term goals more attainable.

I hope the following timeline will help clarify things:

* Tom and I started Engine Yard in 2006. We brought in Ezra and Jayson as founders #3 and #4 a little bit later in 2006.
* Tom and I shared the CEO role in 2007.
* I was CEO alone in 2008.
* During 2008, we took investments from Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon. We were growing fast and this sped things up even more.
* By the middle of 2008, all 4 founders agreed that Engine Yard was growing so fast that we needed someone with the experience to grow the company WAY beyond my/our abilities. I have experience running companies with simple operations in Support, Finance, Sales, etc. Engine Yard grew to 80+ people by the end of 2008 and the organization has grown more complex right along with our customers and the market.
* Someone with prior experience scaling a business from small to medium to large can benefit Engine Yard and its customers a great deal, and I can learn a lot from such a person. Thus, I see this as a good problem to solve.
* We started a search and interviewed a number of fantastic candidates in the Summer, Fall, and Winter of 2008.
* The 4th quarter of 2008 saw a lot of change and analysis. We brought in some great consultants to help us better understand our market and the internals of our business (how to run a financial organization in addition to bookkeeping, where we could operate more efficiently, etc). Add to this the changing landscape with things like cloud computing and we found ourselves needing our first formal budgets and plans for the coming year.
* The overall plan encompasses everything from slightly changing our support, sales, and account management organizations; to bringing out new AWS-based services; to open-sourcing our Vertebra software. The plan took months of input from every part of the company. With regards to layoffs, we decided it was best to wait until after the holidays.
* Back on the CEO search, we were getting into the holiday season and John Dillon stood out as a superb candidate. He's a great guy and has fantastic experience. At earlier points in his life, John was CEO of Salesforce.com, CEO of Hyperion, and he held sales & engineering positions at Oracle & EDS. John earned a degree in engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and an MBA from Golden Gate University.
* We made a deal with John over the Christmas break and it was decided that he'd start when the holidays were over.
* Which leads to this week. We did the layoffs on Monday - the same day John started. I want to clarify that there's no connection between John and the layoffs, nor between my stepping down as CEO and the layoffs. The timing is simply because Monday was the first full work week in 2009.
* Some have asked about my role moving forward. My role is supporting John as he learns the details of Engine Yard, its customers, and its community. I will define a new role for myself where I can use my 3 years at Engine Yard to help us make the best possible decisions.

I hope this helps!

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me at: lwalley (at) engineyard (dot) com

Thanks!

We're on track for a strong 2009 with new and modified services for existing and new segments of customers.

As part of these overall changes, we're moving some people within the organization and letting others go. The net effect is a 15% decrease in personnel.

We deeply appreciate the efforts of everyone at Engine Yard and those who are departing will be missed.

We're setting up an email alias that our departing people can opt into. If you have an interesting opportunity, you can email the alias and anyone who's interested can email you back directly. Please check back this week for details about the email alias.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly at my email address below.

— Lance Walley (lwalley[at]engineyard.com)

You can read details from many sources, including:

* DHH
* Yehuda
* Ezra
* Tom

And I'm sure others (sorry if I forgot anyone!).

We started Engine Yard because of Ruby on Rails and we're very happy to support this cooperation between the two communities. Engine Yard folks who were working on Merb are now working toward Rails 3.0.

Thanks to everyone working on Rails and Merb for making the world a better place! I honestly believe that easier app development (and of course, deployment) does improve the world: it allows more people and their ideas to flourish, and that's a good thing!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

h2. 2008 Portland Railsconf went really well!

Live interaction with people is always the best way to learn what we're doing well and what we can improve. We literally met hundreds of people over 2 days at our booth.

Last year, we brought a half-cluster to show people. This year, we had to bring a full one :-). 500+ virtual machines, hundreds of disks, running in the middle of our booth!

Ezra, Evan, Wilson, Brian, Yehuda, Jamie, and maybe others (sorry if I forgot anyone!) gave presentations on various topics, such as Rubinius, Merb, and hosting Rails apps.

One of the pics below is of Ezra's and Jamie's talk earlier today about Vertebra (our cloud management system; here's Ezra's presentation from Railsconf) and Engine Yard Express (our VM image of an Engine Yard slice that you can run on your laptop!).

Of course, we made time to mingle after hours :-), as shown in the 4th pic, taken at Rogue Ale & Public House in Portland.

For more details, follow the links above for each topic, or check out some of our guys' blogs: Jayson, Evan, Ezra, and Jamie.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and thanks to all our customers for making Engine Yard possible!

!http://blog.engineyard.com/assets/2008/6/2/IMG_0603.jpg!
!http://blog.engineyard.com/assets/2008/6/2/IMG_0591.jpg!

Our UK staff member, Jamie, set up Flickr the other day, and I believe the first pic he uploaded was of his Engine Yard office. Cool to see it!

Our UK presence will be expanding in the coming months as we build our first cluster outside the USA near London.

Thanks!

We're growing fast and we need great people to help us in at least 4 areas:

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1. Rails Application Customer Support
We always need seasoned US, European, and Asian/Australian Rails developers to support our customers with application deployments, tracking down deployment problems, helping with growth issues, etc.

You must substantially demonstrate your solid history in Ruby and Rails. We prefer people who contribute to open-source projects, who blog about relevant topics, who attend relevant conferences, etc.

These jobs are home-based. Solid spoken and written English is required. You will be supporting customers via email, IRC, tickets, and telephone.

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2. System Administration / Customer Support
Similar to job #1 above, but focused on Gentoo Linux sys admin instead of Ruby and Rails applications directly.

These jobs are home-based. Solid spoken and written English is required. You will be supporting customers via email, IRC, tickets, and telephone.

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3. MySQL DBA
We have DBAs now, but we need an additional one. We need someone who fell in love with MySQL many years ago and who became a MySQL DBA at least a few years ago.

You should have concrete experience administering and tuning MySQL databases for large MySQL implementations.

Location is not super important, but we prefer someone who lives in or will relocate to San Francisco. Solid spoken and written English is required, as you will sometimes be supporting customers via email, IRC, tickets, and telephone.

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4. Rails Developer-turned-Salesperson
We have one very strong person who's been doing Rails development for several years and who now does technical sales full-time. We need another!

The job requires that you be able to speak deeply about Ruby and Rails programming, help customers figure out what they need, provide formal quotes, attend conferences, and help customers choose a good wine if they take you to dinner. In other words, this job is definitely very technical and very social.

We strongly prefer someone who lives in or will relocate to San Francisco or New York City. Pay is very competitive. Solid spoken and written English is required. We prefer people who can travel on short notice.

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If you're interested in one of these jobs, please let us know. And if you know someone who would be a great fit, please let them know.

Thanks.

This has been in the works for several months and, in fact, our relationship with them started over a year ago when Peter Fenton (a partner at Benchmark) approached us for a lunch meeting.

We set up a financial model for Engine Yard long before we took our first customer, and that model only required relatively small amounts of capital to reach profitability.

When VCs started approaching us, we weren't sure we wanted to follow that path. There are pros and cons, of course, to any such decision.

But the advantages of working with a first-class VC like Benchmark, with fantastic partners Peter Fenton and Mitch Lasky on our Board, outweighed any risks we had in mind. Their experience alone is very valuable!

One of the risks is that we might lose focus on our very service-oriented Rails hosting business.

Our hosting customers are core to Engine Yard and the reason for our success. Managing and scaling customer apps allows us to stay close to the community and the technology. Let me state this with absolute clarity: Supporting our hosting customers will remain our priority.

The investment allows us to strengthen the hosting business and to pursue things we think are valuable long-term, such as:

* Building new clusters in Sacramento, New Jersey, and London over the next 3 months. This is faster than we would otherwise, and allows us to stay well ahead of customer needs.

* Supporting the open-source Ruby implementation Rubinius by bringing on 4 great contributors to join Evan Phoenix's team at Engine Yard.

* Supporting the Ruby web framework Merb by bringing on 1 full-time contributor and several part-time contributors.

* Strengthening business infrastructure at Engine Yard, such as our phone system, CRM, accounting, etc.

* Strengthening our staff to better support changing needs of customers, such as growing technical sales and account management.

* Offering new options to customers who want the same ease-of-use they find with deployments at Engine Yard, but running on their own large server farms or on various cloud computing platforms. For instance, we hired a very talented individual from Yahoo last week, who helped manage tens of thousands of servers.

We believe Ruby and Rails are very important technologies, and we see this investment as a key tool to better support both!

Perhaps a half-dozen customers and Rails folks have stopped by and said "hi", which is always enjoyable and educational.

We started thinking about moving earlier in 2007, then found a great location in October in the area called "South Park". It's difficult to find space in South Park, and this space had just come on the market the day before we came looking, so we figured it was destiny :-).

The building has office space on the ground floor and 3 apartments above. The building faces a small park.

One of the apartments is for visiting employees and customers, and the other two apartments are for permanent employees.

Ezra moved from Spokane about a month ago, Tom just moved from Sacramento this week, Loren is more or less living full-time in SF, and I'm splitting my time between SF and Sacramento for a little while longer.

The core team will be living and working in San Francisco within the next month, and various other employees are considering moving to SF or to nearby Sacramento.

Sacramento is 90 miles away and is where our first 6 clusters are housed. Don't worry, we have 2 great employees staying in Sacramento and a 3rd is probably going to move to Sacramento from Missouri, so we'll always have very competent people near the Sacramento data center, not to mention the 24-hour employees of the data center itself.

We see this move as an important part of being closer to our customers and to the Ruby and Rails communities.

Ronelly opens the office between 8:30-9:00am and closes around 4:30pm, but most of us are night owls, so we're around much later in many cases.

If you're in San Francisco, please stop by. We'd love to see you!