In the 21st century, cloud computing has become a real catch in the IT industry. With large data to store securely and transfer between different employees in a company, cloud storage has become quintessential. Many existing businesses have expanded their solution range to provide cloud storage as a service and startups exclusively providing cloud-based software have also been established. New Relic is one such startup that develops and delivers cloud-based software. Lew Cirne established New Relic in 2008 which is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, United States.
About The Company
New Relic is a cloud-based software company that develops a range of innovative software to help different companies help their performance. With the help of New Relic software, a company can track the performance of its service, website, and application. This helps the companies to understand the problem and fix it more efficiently to create a better user experience. Apart from the real-time monitoring of the web and application data, the software also provides support for custom-built plugins. New Relic appointed its new CEO this year, Bill Staples who replaced Lew Cirne, the founder and former CEO of the company.
Success In The Second Attempt
In 2008, Lew Cirne founded the software company New Relic and he named it so after an anagram of his name. Lew Cirne, from a very young age, had an entrepreneurship niche and wanted to start his company. While he was in high school, he planned and attempted to start a company to productize a game but unfortunately, it wasn’t successful. Later, when he went to college at Dartmouth, he successfully landed a job at Apple. But, the fever of entrepreneurship still bugged him and he left Apple after three years.
Lew thought it will be better for him to join a small company and learn about the length and breadth of an early-stage startup. So, he joined a company called Hummingbird which then was a team of 300 members. Being part of a small company allowed him to explore other divisions of the business apart from engineering. After a couple of years, Lew successfully founded Wily but it wasn’t a full stop. On the search for new technology, Cirne ended up starting another successful startup, New Relic.
History of New Relic
After founding New Relic in 2008, the company hosted its first round of funding five years after and raised $80 million. Some of the major investors included Benchmark Capital, Allen & Company, Insight Venture Partners, Trinity Venture, Tenaya Capital, etc. After this funding round, the valuation of New Relic became $750 million. After receiving this fund, the company invested in launching Android and iOS native mobile apps for its software analytics platform. Next year, New Relic landed another $100 million funding from BlackRock Inc, Passport Capital, and Wellington Management. In late 2014, New Relic became a public company.
Last year, the company hired Bill Staples as the new Chief Product Officer whose responsibility of leading the product management team, engineering, and driving the company’s platform strategy. After Bill Staples joined the New Relic team, restructuring of the costing model took place which resulted in some layoffs. Only after a year of joining the company, Bill Staples got promoted to CEO and took the place of Lew Cirne.
About The Founder
Lew Cirne is a Canadian-American technologist and entrepreneur who is famous for founding Wily Technologies and New Relic. He majored in Computer Science from Dartmouth College and joined Apple straight after graduating. Being in Silicon Valley, his dream to become an entrepreneur was triggered. He realized he can barely teach himself any entrepreneurial skills by being part of such a massive company. So, he joined a small company called Hummingbird Communications and after two years founded Wily. He is one of those entrepreneurs who broke the myth that startups are not for post-thirty people.
Bill Staples – CEO of New Relic
Before joining New Relic as the CPO in 2020, Bill Staples had working experience in Adobe and worked for 17 years at Microsoft. In both companies, Bill led teams of a huge number of employees to create transformative products and implement innovative strategies.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more