keep looking - Anonymous employee Gillware Employee Review

Gillware, over the last decade, has gone from 3 engineering friends working out of our basement to just under fifty employees. Our first hires outside our founding group, had full health care benefits and 401K plans with company match within our first year as a business. I felt we owed it to them, and if we couldn't grow a good enough company to easily provide health care and retirement benefits then it wasn't a company I wanted to own. After about four years of running the successful data recovery lab, we decided to utilize our storage expertise and software expertise and start our cloud data initiative to help our clients keep their data safely backed up moving forward. In the last ten years we've had to move three times into larger accommodations. 35 out of the last 36 quarters have seen revenues increase from the same quarter the previous year, usually significantly more than 12%. We have accomplished this consistent growth due to our amazing engineering staff, client retention and our sales leader's abilities to land strategic partnerships with many of the largest storage companies in the world. This revenue growth occurred despite challenging economic times and circumstances. We have never taken a dime of angel or VC investment. Both Gillware companies (recovery & cloud) were 100% boot-strapped from day 1. We don't have, and never have had, a safety-net of a large investor or large credit lines from a bank beneath us. The pace at which storage companies are producing new product lines and the variety of products where people are putting their critical data is growing. The storage industry gives us little support and these devices are not sold with maintenance manuals. Full drive hardware encryption and virtualization, while offering tremendous value to the industry, sure do make data recovery hard when things go south. Benefit and marketing costs have increased every year. Our clients live in the same challenging climate. It's been up to us to get them out of a jam they didn't budget for and we must to continue to serve them with thin margins so they can afford to stay in business themselves. Gillware has survived and thrived despite these factors. Our recovery staff is on the leading edge of all storage technology. Our backup team built an amazing cloud infrastructure and we wrote every single line of server and client side code ourselves. That codebase and infrastructure gets better, every day. To address to point about cackling with glee as we under pay young people, this is a malicious untruth. Every intern we've ever hired has been paid, typically between $10-20 an hour. It's not a living wage but these folks get tremendous experience in their future fields. Two of our lead programmers started with us as a pair of interns eight years ago. We've taken care of them and they appreciate the fun atmosphere and awesome projects. With their resumes and experience they could work for any company they want. Our sales leadership is stable. Our two lead sales executives have been with us for the last eight years and are largely responsible for our strategic partnerships with some of the biggest IT companies in the world. It’s true we’ve had to let some non-performing sales staff go over the years, anyone that runs a sales team understands that no matter how to try to screen and train you can’t bat 100% in this arena. People that are highly autonomous and driven, with a true passion for service and their career of choice thrive here. They enjoy the lack of a manager breathing down their neck all day and the freedom to succeed or fail based on their own abilities, intuition, creativity and efforts. Management is here to help but ultimately it’s up to you. You must have the ambition and willpower to finish projects and close deals. That's all I asked when I worked for someone else and that's the culture I'm trying to cultivate. Gillware makes big decisions extremely quickly, sometimes over an email or a cup of coffee in the break room. It is one of the few advantages we have over our larger and better capitalized competition. We typically do not have 90 minute staff meetings where 90% of the content is meaningless to most at any given time. Some people are used to a bureaucratic atmosphere and need this type of meeting as a forum to add their voice to the corporate vision. This doesn't mean that there isn't opportunity for employees to join the “inner circle”; the reality is that such a circle does not exist. Employees that are bold tend to join us in the non-existent inner circle; it's quite roomy in here due to its lack of existence. I don’t have an office; anyone can easily get my attention with anything that might be on their mind. For folks that have never been exposed to a Silicon Valley style start-up outside of watching a crappy movie, it can be a culture shock. I'm proud of our dedication to our clients and the culture we’ve built. We're just getting started.