At Chronosphere, we value the culture we share as much as the code we ship. Which is why we’re delighted to be recognized for our culture by two key employee satisfaction platforms.

Comparably’s Best Company Perks and Benefits

Comparably is unique in that it doesn’t allow companies to self-nominate for its annual awards. Instead, winners are determined based on feedback by those who know a company best – its employees.  

And after Comparably evaluated the tech industry across sixteen core culture metrics, we’re honored to have been recognized in their Best Perks and Benefits category. Comparably specifically cited our global offerings in Family Forming, Wellbeing, and Gender Affirmation spending accounts, as well as better disability coverage and offering HSA contributions in the US.

But there‘s more to perks than just benefits. It’s why Chronosphere offers flexible time off, development, parental leave, access to professional coaching, and free lunches.  And, most important, an inclusive culture that comes together to share in our collective success — things like our company-wide getaway to Puerto Rico for Chronosphere’s third birthday.

Otta’s Rocket List 2022

Otta is a job search platform that pairs candidates with relevant tech roles. For their annual Rocket List, Otta evaluated over 7,000 tech companies, and picked 100 based on three criteria: impressive fundraising, disruptive missions, and exploding headcounts. 

Chronosphere’s inclusion on this list is not only an affirmation that our product is redefining cloud observability, but that our people are receiving the upward mobility they deserve for their dedication toward making Chronosphere what it is today.

Looking ahead.

For some companies, this type of recognition can be a navel-gazing exercise to stop and admire what they’ve done. For us at Chronosphere, we view these two awards as a testament to the culture that we’ve built — but also to the momentum we’re building. Because we’re just getting started.

I joined Chronosphere as an Engineering Manager in January after spending the past five and a half years at Palantir, where I led the observability team. My team was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure which enabled our engineers to observe and monitor their systems, debug issues as they occurred, and resolve problems in a timely manner. Our production fleet consisted of hundreds of thousands of pods running at any given point in time. Anybody who’s worked with distributed systems at this scale understands the criticality of good observability tooling: without highly available and reliable monitoring systems, you and the business are flying blind.

Chronosphere first appeared on my radar through this previous role, where one of the largest ongoing pain points for my team was managing the metrics usage of other engineering teams in the organization. It was all too easy for a developer to add a line of code which inadvertently blew up their metrics cardinality, and along with it, our observability bill. 

When I first joined the observability team at Palantir, we relied on in-house tooling built on top of our own data platform to monitor metrics usage on a per-team basis. While partially automated, it still required human intervention to resolve the issues that inevitably surfaced. This solution required an ongoing and active energy investment and failed to effectively “put the pebble in the shoe” of the teams instrumenting their services in an inefficient manner, where the value derived from the metrics was not proportionate with the cost.

My team built tooling that programmatically dropped low-value metrics, but I was intrigued by the opportunity to build generalized versions of such solutions at Chronosphere. I had a deep understanding of the frustrations experienced as a member of the central observability team. Chronosphere offered capabilities to manage metrics usage out of the box that I’d wished I had on my own team. This stood out to me as a game-changer in a highly competitive observability landscape, and I was convinced that their product would all but sell itself.

Conviction in the product seeded my initial interest, and the opportunity to participate in solving organizational problems at a quickly-growing early stage startup sealed the deal. My previous company had over 3,000 employees when I left. Chronosphere had closer to 100 people when I joined this past January and we’ve since doubled in size.

While at Palantir, I had an amazing mentor who taught me the characteristics of an effective Engineering Manager over the course of several years. I was frequently outside of my comfort zone and it was a trial by fire at times, but my mentor gave me the tools and coaching I needed to solve hard engineering and leadership problems. The lessons that stuck with me the most were those which were learned through painful failures. However, the growth I experienced during these periods of discomfort was unparalleled. Toward the end of my tenure at the company, the periods of discomfort waned and my own growth tapered. I knew it was time for me to find a place where I could both continue to grow independently and also pass along the lessons and skills that I had learned.

Since starting at Chronosphere, I’ve ramped up on three engineering teams and had an opportunity to apply the same lessons about building well-oiled software development machines in different contexts on a far more condensed timeline. I’ve been exposed to new problems, such as how to foster collaborative relationships between engineering and the field, and how to construct an effective hiring pipeline. However, the most unique set of challenges have come from remote work.

This was the first time that I joined a company remotely and it presented a unique set of additional challenges. I didn’t fully appreciate how much harder it is to ramp up and feel connected to the broader company in a remote-first environment. You lose out on all of the organic interactions which occur in the office and there isn’t a well-established playbook for how to bridge this gap, particularly at scale. In response to these new challenges, we’re experimenting with creative ways to build a strong culture in our distributed workforce, with efforts ranging from the highly local, such as supporting grassroots team clusters that we see forming in local coworking spaces, to global, such as holding company-wide events in virtual reality. This is at the cutting edge of how we work, and we get to pave the path at Chronosphere. The camaraderie is real.

The past nine months have gone by in a blur. At the same time, it feels like far more has happened than what deserves to reasonably fit within this timeframe, in the best way possible. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.

If any of this resonates with you, there might be a place for you at Chronosphere. Reach out and let’s chat.

It’s that time of year again where we look back at the last 12 months of progress, development, and adventures with Chronosphere. Let’s take a look back together, bringing you up to speed on some of the highlights we’ve brought to the cloud native observability market.

Growth

In June of this year we celebrated our three year anniversary in our first gathering of the entire company in Puerto Rico. This culminated in the celebrations of the latest successes. We enjoyed our time on the beaches of San Juan tremendously. Our hearts go out to the people of Puerto Rico in the wake of the devastation from Hurricane Fiona.

One of those successes has been the growth of our employees, expanding with new hires across the globe and increasing the team by a factor of three (3x). Three hub offices in New York, Seattle, and EU (Vilnius, Lithuania) provide an on-site presence, though we are a remote first company with a distributed workforce. Despite being distributed, the company has come together this year both to celebrate and to meet face to face. We continue a high-growth trajectory and are making it a priority to hire responsibly and sustainably into the future.

A big part of the growth at Chronosphere is the continued expansion of our leadership team, meant to fuel both long term customer and financial growth. To that end, the leadership team welcomed two new members with vast industry experience. Scott Mersy joined as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Bryan Dell as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). 

Scott joins the company with over two decades of marketing leadership experience, holding leadership positions at prominent SaaS companies including ServiceNow and Webex, and most recently serving as CMO at BigID. Scott will be responsible for leading Chronosphere’s marketing strategy and plans to focus on initiatives including customer-focused storytelling and global expansion.

Bryan was the Chief Revenue Officer of BigPanda, and held a number of sales leadership roles at hyper-growth companies including Medallia, AppDynamics, and Lacework. Bryan’s initial focus will be on continuing to expand our customer base, ensuring a world-class customer experience from pre- to post-sales engagement, and recruiting top talent to expand the team.

Customers

While the customer base has been growing significantly over the past year, Chronosphere was very happy to add major new logos like Snap  and Robinhood. It continues to confirm the belief that as the only SaaS monitoring and observability solution that gives customers complete control over their data resolution and retention, allowing them to scale their monitoring while controlling costs, Chronosphere is setting a strong foundation for the company to continue to fill a growing need in the market. Both Snap and Robinhood have chosen to take this opportunity to join the growing group of customers ready to take charge of their cloud native observability.

Industry recognition

Over the past year there has been quite a bit of industry attention to our activities, showing that the need for delivering on cloud native observability promises has never been greater. 

Back in May, Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ) released its research report on DEJ Top 10 Vendors for Enabling Leading Organizations in Observability with Chronosphere shown as a leader in addressing all key challenges and vendor capabilities. 

In a second DEJ report they surveyed over 3300 organizations for their Top 20 Vendors for Enabling Best Performing Organizations in Managing IT Operations report. Chronosphere was reported as a leader, top of the scales used in this report, in all eight key user requirements categories.

Over at Gartner in 2022 Chronosphere was mentioned as a representative vendor for Observability in several Hype Cycles reports:

We strive constantly to be a partner helping you level up your cloud native observibility activities.

Product news

Since our last look at the Chronosphere product, there has been a lot of work delivered to expand our capabilities to help know, triage, remediate, and understand your cloud native architectures with a state-of-art cloud native observability platform. 

You can now install and use Chronosphere as your cloud native observability platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) directly from the Google Marketplace.

Earlier this year Chronosphere presented a cool look at a new distributed tracing feature in the product, with detailed looks at what both novice and advanced users can do with it. We’ve also got a bit of breaking news, so keep this under your hat for now, but there will be more new tracing capabilities being announced soon. Stay tuned!

Understanding cardinality over time was a great introduction article to a new feature providing a way to get an approximate cardinality for an arbitrary set of time series at any point in time.

We’ve been hearing from organizations around the world that alerts are on the rise, and engineers are experiencing burnout and alert fatigue. To help with this problem we’ve added new alert history features. See how they work in this article. 

Events

This last year we have all seen the events calendar pick up with a few more on-site events to go along with the almost normal virtual events. Chronosphere was active across the globe and you can find the content from all these listed below on our events page:

As for the upcoming year end events, Chronosphere would love for you to come meet us at KubeCon NA 2022.

There have been many webinars by Chronosphere where we continue to provide insights, education, and learnings from the cloud native observability world. Here are a few top picks from the last year:

All in all it’s been a very productive, exciting, and energizing time as we’ve grown, shared, and helped you gain the upper hand with the complex world of cloud native observability.  

Before I kick off my blog about Chronosphere’s third anniversary—which we celebrated by gathering together for the first time in-person, in Puerto Rico!—and a rundown of our booming year-three, I need to set the scene. 

A year ago this time, I was writing about how our second birthday capped an epic year of product building and about what would be the launch of today’s rocket ship momentum. In our second year, we announced general availability of our highly scalable observability product and we received a $43M Series B funding round. We also saw our workforce triple in the space of a year, and we were starting to solve observability challenges for huge customers like DoorDash. 

We are a remote-first company, but we also strongly believe in safely getting together in-person when possible. However, this time last year, the pandemic was still keeping us working from home. I was beaming into our weekly All Hands meeting from the social-distancing safety of my laundry room as I walked our (then) sixty-person workforce through the huge milestones that show how far we’d come in such a short time. 

There was no shortage of reasons to celebrate last year, and, based on rapid acceleration of cloud native adoption and rampant observability challenges that needed solving, it was obvious big things were to yet come…who knew it would be this big, this fast! I’ll sum it all up in my next annual “then-and-now” Chronoversary anniversary story.

Here we go:

Year three: The Chronosphere rocket ship launches

As we ring in Chronosphere’s third year at a company-wide, in-person getaway in Puerto Rico, the focus is on how our early momentum fueled all avenues of company growth. In the last year, Chronosphere hit even bigger milestones, ranging from workforce size to product innovations to $250M in total funding to multi-million dollar annual recurring revenues (ARR) reaching 16x growth to our status as a unicorn to in-person gatherings in exotic lands.

Aerial view of the company on a Puerto Rican beach and in Chronosphere “eye” formation.

Workforce growth

Then: A year ago our collective heads were spinning about the fact that, despite the pandemic, our workforce had tripled in the space of a year. At the time, we had sixty Chronospherians distributed across ten U.S. states and three EU countries. We have our remote-first model to thank for allowing us to grow our workforce so quickly because it means we aren’t limited to hiring around physical hubs. 

Today: We have once again more than tripled last year’s (then-tripled) workforce. You read that right: We are closing in on 200 employees spread across the globe and we now have three hub offices in New York, Seattle, and EU (Vilnius, Lithuania). Even as we continue a high-growth trajectory, we make a responsible and sustainable approach to hiring our priority.

$200M in Series C funding and achieved unicorn status

Then: A year ago we were thrilled with our $43 million in Series B funding, which brought our then-total funding to $55 million. This critical funding provided the runway we needed to grow our company.

Now: Chronosphere has since raised an additional $200 million in Series C funding, bringing our total funding to $250M. And as a privately held startup valued at over $1 billion, we’ve achieved unicorn status at lightning speed. Becoming a unicorn in a little more than two years is so rare, Chronosphere was ranked in the top 10 fastest B2B SaaS unicorns, according to Pitchbook.

Consecutive quarter-over-quarter record growth over 12 months

Then: We had more than doubled our revenue in the first quarter of 2021 alone and were rapidly onboarding new customers. 

Now: In February 2022 we shared the news that our multi-million dollar ARR saw 16x growth in the past 12 months. As a result Chronosphere is on pace to be one of the fastest B2B SaaS companies to go from $1 million to $50 million in ARR, faster than well-known SaaS companies like Datadog, CrowdStrike, and Confluent.

Also, we significantly expanded our customer base and brought on two of the top five publicly traded fintech companies, including Robinhood. Meanwhile, our existing customers, like Abnormal Security and Doordash, continue to expand their usage.

Chronosphere observability platform innovations 

Then: We had recently announced the general availability of our highly scalable, purpose-built for cloud native monitoring product.

Now: While metrics continue to be a leading component in observability practices, as systems have become more distributed, the need for tracing has become more apparent. The Chronosphere observability platform is now able to ingest distributed traces at scale, seamlessly integrated alongside with metrics, to more rapidly triage and understand the root cause of problems. 

Gathering in-person as a company for the first time – on a Caribbean island!

Then: All meetings were 100% via Zoom. ‘nuf said.

Martin’s laundry room
Celebrating Chronosphere’s 2nd Birthday on Zoom

Now: As I post this blog, the fact that I’m no longer stuck in my laundry room, and instead celebrating Chronosphere’s third anniversary in Puerto Rico along with the rest of the Chronosphere team—in-person!!—says it all. 

We hope to make fabulous company getaways like our trip to Puerto Rico a tradition, so if fun in-person gatherings and riding a rocket ship to success appeals to you, have a look at our open roles and come join the team.

In this Meet the Team profile, we chat with Luke Tillman, located in Denver, Colorado, on what it’s like to be a front-end engineer on the platform team. Luke, who is well-versed in open-sourcing, joined Chronosphere and was actually one of the first hires on the UI team. Catch up on the whole chat with Chris Ward. Below are a few highlights.

What do you do at Chronosphere? 

I’m a front-end engineer – a UI engineer – on the platform team. So, I work on our cloud product, but on the front end. We have a handful of other folks that also do UI work – they aren’t full-time front-end or UI engineers, but most of the UI folks work on the platform on the cloud.

What were some of the reasons you decided to come to Chronosphere?

I was one of the first two UI engineers hired. There were two things. When I started looking at Chronosphere, one aspect that jumped out at me immediately was the chance to work with cool distributed systems tech again. I have a little bit of background there. When I was looking at M3, our open source database that the tech is built around, it reminded me a lot of Cassandra – which is something that I worked with at a previous company. 

The biggest reason that I ended up joining was the people. When I interviewed, everybody was just super kind and empathetic and it was really obvious even in the interview process. It gave me a chance to work with Sterling – the head of our UX who I adore, and we worked together at a previous company. The people are really what drew me and what keeps me around even a year and a half later. 

What did you do before coming to Chronosphere?

I’ve been in tech for about twenty years now. I guess that dates me. I started out more full-stack, and spent a bunch of time in the . NET space. I wrote a lot of C# in my early days.

I kind of burned out on tech in my twenties, and three years in my late twenties I just quit tech completely. I was a bartender for three years which was actually a lot of fun.

Most recently, I was at a company called DataStax, where I worked on all things Apache Cassandra-related. That was fun. 

I also joined DevRel. I was a developer advocate for the first three years. It was something I had never done before. I got to go around and travel, give talks, and teach which I really enjoyed. I eventually went back to engineering full-time.

What is the most interesting technical challenge that Chronosphere is solving?

It has to do with the scale of data that our customers are working with. Working with distributed databases, there’s a certain set of challenges that you don’t have unless you’re working at a bigger scale that some of these technologies solve. When you’re dealing with a huge scale of data, we think about things like: “How do you present a huge volume of data in a meaningful way?” It gets more challenging when you’re dealing with a scale that some of our customers have – or even making sure that things in the front-end perform. And that’s something you don’t get to do at every job. 

What are you working on right now that you’re most excited about?

I’m on a new dashboard work stream that has been rolling for a little while. I’m doing most of my work right now in an open source project called Perses – where we’re building a dashboarding solution. It’s a lot of fun, and an opportunity to work in open source again. I’m having a good time building dashboarding from scratch.

What’s a fun fact about you that nobody would guess?

A friend of mine from grade school moved out here to Denver before I did and really got into the craft brewing scene and wanted to open his own brewery. I got the chance to invest a teeny tiny bit of money, so I own a little bit of a craft brewery here in Denver – called Downhill Brewing. 

What cool new tool are you trying out that you want to tell everyone about?

There is this project called Cue Lang. It’s a really interesting way of defining contracts for things – like our configuration of APIs. You can define structures, and get all sorts of validation and code generations for free. It’s a cool little piece of technology that I’ve been playing around with recently. 

If you were an animal, what would you be? 

I would be a dog. My wife and I have two and I adore them. I think I would live my best life eating, sleeping and playing. We have two lhasa apsos that have Ewok faces.

Who is someone you’ve considered a role model in your life or career?

I’d say my parents played a huge role at different points and for different reasons. Early on, my Mom is the one who really instilled my work ethic and a love for learning that I still have to this day. She got me reading at a really young age – fiction and things like that. That’s something that I still do every day, before I go to bed. 

Later on in life, my dad played a huge role. My Dad’s been a software engineer for about forty years now. He works for Pivotal, in open source projects. He’s been a wealth of knowledge and really helpful at talking through things with me. Tech is a family business for us. My other two brothers have done coding boot camps.

What is a quote that you reflect on that motivates you?

I asked my wife this last night. I don’t really have a quote. If I had a quote, it would probably be from a movie. It would have to be “Runaway!!!” from Monty Python, the Holy Grail.

Listen in to hear Chris and Luke’s entire conversation:

More blogs in the Meet the Team series

Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer

Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff

Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff

Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager

Meet the Chronosphere Team: Audrey Bastian, UX Designer

Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff

Meet the Chronosphere Team: Brandon Bright, Account Executive

In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we get to know Alex Miljanić, a Senior Sales Development Representative (SDR) who works out of Chronosphere’s New York office. In her role as an SDR, Alex is the first line of contact for many of Chronosphere’s new customers. In this interview with Chris Ward, Alex indulges us with her day-to-day life as a Sales Rep in the observability space, why she joined Chronosphere, and she talks fondly about her brief stint as an English teacher abroad.

What do you do at Chronosphere?

As a Senior Sales Development Representative (SDR) my day-to-day job includes sourcing, tiering new accounts, identifying champions and main point of contacts – I do a lot of the original engagements when we’re trying to break in and identify a good use case fit for our observability platform. 

Is this about developing relationships?

Yes, I’m the first line of contact for many of the relationships we have/will have with incoming customers. My team will tier out accounts, collect information on their tools and challenges, and plan a strategy for use case tie-ins so we can have introductory conversations and make sure our relationship would be mutually beneficial. 

What were some of the reasons that you decided to come to Chronosphere?

I came from a competitor. That was my first experience in sales. I really enjoyed observability and open source projects – and how those projects worked from the perspective of the engineers. I always wanted to stay in tech, but I found that my niche was in observability. Understanding how Chronosphere works, how scalable it is, how novel some of our control plane abilities are alongside the aggregation rights – ultimately, it was a decision about how advanced the technology is within the current day market, that’s what drew me in. 

What did you do before coming to Chronosphere?

I worked in sales at another tech company and I wanted to stay within that space because I found that when you’re talking to engineers, observability is something always being prioritized or on the roadmap for future prioritizations – it’s a stabilizing front for teams understanding how their systems are behaving. If I’m talking to people in big banks, or talking to startups that are just getting their products off the ground – everybody is moving towards microservices, which are complex in nature and especially at scale. To handle microservices architectures, teams need to employ a seamless integration with reliable monitoring tools to track their metrics. 

Observability sounds like a buzzword, but whenever I speak to engineers, it doesn’t matter if I’m  talking to a VP of engineering or an SRE – when you say observability, describe Chronosphere with one or two sentences, it resonates with everybody. Whether or not it’s a current challenge that the company is facing is another story. But when you bring up the product, it’s something that everybody’s familiar with as being something of critical value 

What is the most interesting technical challenge that Chronosphere is solving?

The scalability of microservices and resolving their associated pains. What I’m referring to can present itself in the form of outages and cardinality spikes in the same systems SRE and DevOps teams are actively managing. Chronosphere is particularly positioned in the market to handle these things.

We have the transparency and the visibility into your data which, now with these microservices becoming popularized and a de facto standard in the market – you’re noticing when you’re having these conversations with engineers, that they are all starting to see issues with the scale. They’re starting to understand that open source projects may not be able to handle the massive volume that they’re managing. So, they either have to hire a ton of engineers to build homegrown systems that can scale better – which costs a lot of money, or defer to SaaS vendors. 

So, the answer to your question is scalability, through and through, which Martin talks about in his blogs and podcasts and Rob writes about in blogs as well.

What are you working on right now that you’re excited about?

At the moment, the team is working around strategically reframing not only what kinds of customers/teams we’re actively targeting, but also planning for the changing secondary and tertiary questions that they’re asking us given their wider experience in resolving the variable issues with their observability stack. OS technologies are fantastic – they’re amongst the most exciting pieces of the tech space for me. Engineers love them, and they love to adopt and configure them. The intersection point is creating a managed system that avoids vendor lock-in by being compatible with Graphite and Prometheus to maintain comfort/familiarity, but can successfully scale and store those metric stacks and reduce management overhead. 

What’s a fun fact about you that nobody would guess? 

This is actually on my LinkedIn. I worked at a Czech University in Prague as an English teacher for a year with students that were ages 16 to 28. I was 23, but I think they all imagined me as being older just because I was making the decisions in the classroom. A lot of incredibly intelligent exchange students who all had an impressive level of grit leaving their families to live in a different country.   

If you were an animal, what would you be? 

I’ll say what other people call me – a llama. I have a friend at Chronosphere that always calls me a llama. I’m a little goofy and I have a really long neck. 

Who is someone that you consider a role model and how have they helped guide you in your life or career?

My Dad got a PhD in computer science from Rutgers University. That’s why both of my parents relocated from Serbia to America. Then war broke out over there and they ended up staying in America. I would say my Dad influenced me both from an academic and professional standpoint. He’s just incredibly hard working, so I’ve had those ideas instilled in me from a very young age. Growing up, becoming an adult – I’ve realized having parents who aren’t just solid parents but are also good people is a real gift. My dad always used to say that when you start speaking too loudly in a discussion, your content becomes less and less relevant. That’s a pretty important point in life; I think you should always be clear. If you operate with distracting behaviors, people will get distracted. 

What’s a quote you reflect on, you mention to people a lot, or that motivates you?

It’s kind of corny, but it’s one of Chronosphere’s pillars: “Win together, lose together.” When you’re a part of a cohort, everybody shares the same objective and the responsibility when things are going badly and when things are going well. You just have to stay aligned and share the emotional ups and downs that happen. I think in sales, they happen rather frequently.  

Listen in to hear Alex and Chris’ entire conversation here: 

The world is a heavy place right now. It’s impossible to look away from the escalating crisis in Ukraine, as we grapple with ways to assist from near and far. With one of Chronosphere’s three hubs located in the neighboring Republic of Lithuania, and because some of our team members are Ukrainian, we stand especially strong with the people of Ukraine. Chronosphere is rallying as a company to offer support in whatever way we can, ranging from organizing company-matched donations (raising more than $18K between our ~140 employees and company match) to listening to advice from Ukrainian teammates about trusted news sources.

At times like these we draw strength from past struggles to make the world a better place. In that spirit, this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) was especially empowering. This year’s IWD “Break the Bias” theme was centered around raising awareness against bias that enables one gender to dominate over the other. Gender bias is especially challenging in the tech space, where women strive for equal pay, opportunities, development, and mentorship in roles – from technical to sales to marketing and beyond – historically held by men.

In the gender-equal world envisioned by IWD organizers, the world is “free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination” and differences are valued and celebrated. 

At Chronosphere, we couldn’t agree more! Creating a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a priority that we work towards every day – which we were thrilled to discuss at a special IWD event held this week for a group of women in tech and allies. In honor of IWD’s Break the Bias theme, we gathered together to share a meal, meet new people, and talk about workplace experiences and challenges. Below I walk through the details and share some fun photos from the day.

Sharing workplace experiences as women in tech

Our International Women’s Day event took place Monday March 7 and was our first of what will be many community-based events to come. More than 50 people joined in on the conversation, including our co-founders, Martin Mao (CEO) and Rob Skillington (CTO), as well as leaders and team members from across the company – from engineering to marketing to sales. 

There were two sessions for our attendees to choose from: one track focused on tech and one focused on marketing. During these sessions, guest speakers from Chronosphere weighed in on how they became the leaders and contributors in tech that they are today. They walked through personal and professional stories that were illustrated with photos and provided a deep sense of “who” makes up Chronosphere’s workforce. 

In addition to providing guests with good food and dialogue, they were also given the opportunity to vote on one of two organizations – Voices of Children and Girls Who Code – geared toward helping others and advancing women in tech. The winner would receive a $5K donation from Chronosphere. Scroll on down to find out which organization won the vote (spoiler – both!)

Our warm welcome for International Women’s Day

Kicking things off, Chronosphere’s Technical Recruiting Manager, Natalie Pau, (Chronosphere’s first recruiter) touched on the variety of backgrounds that make up our vibrant team, and introduced the speakers of this event: 

“One of the reasons I decided to join Chronosphere was seeing the clear mission to build a diverse team. I remember reading a TechCrunch article when Chronosphere first raised its Series B funding. Martin said DEI was a key focal point here and wanted to make sure they were building a diverse, inclusive foundational team – from the ground up. Now, we want to make sure we’re supporting the next wave of female engineers out there.” 

In an effort to cultivate a safe and supportive environment for women in tech, Natalie mentioned our #chronogals Slack channel – an inclusive space for our teammates to engage in open dialogue. 

Co-founder and CEO, Martin Mao

Following Natalie’s intro, Martin painted a picture of Chronosphere, sharing the journey of how the company came to be.

Martin went on to underscore Chronosphere’s ground-up plan to build a culture of DEI. 

Martin captured Chronosphere’s guiding values when he said: “We founded this company with a principal that we have continued to stick by – and that’s building a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In building a diverse workforce, we have a component of awareness and intent to solve a problem.”

Martin also noted, “When we look at the low numbers of women entering this industry, the numbers drop further in leadership roles. That’s why we’re looking to implement awareness programs throughout the company.” Martin mentions that this will take shape in a few ways: 

Women of Chronosphere: Talking tech

After intros from Natalie and Martin, we all went into one of two breakout rooms where guest speakers from Chronosphere’s marketing and tech teams shared their experiences as women in tech.

Engineering Manager, Elenore Bastian 

Our engineering team is growing rapidly, and women are increasingly powering that growth – and challenging the status-quo of a normally male dominated industry. Elenore kicked off the tech track breakout session, highlighting how to use networking to get more opportunities: “I used my social time to network with my peers. And, I actually became really good at ping pong.” 

Elenore also mentioned how many women today have to work around the “Prove-It Again” bias: “A lot of times, women find themselves having to prove themselves on skill sets, while men are assumed to be capable. Men are given the benefit of the doubt, and women are judged strictly by what they’ve accomplished.” 

Elenore brought up the importance of receiving stretch assignments – which are projects that are generally outside of one’s skill set: “So, how do you get those stretch assignments? Through networking and sponsorship. We naturally socialize and network with people like us. This just means we have to take deliberate action to Break the Bias. She offered a few tips:

UX designer, Claire Kim

Claire touched on her past experience in a less diverse workplace and her experience as a mom in the tech world: 

“I started my career in advertising, which wasn’t exactly like Mad Men, but it had similar characteristics. I realized that bias mainly comes from lack of knowledge and experience. Once I moved into tech and became a mom, I battled between wanting to be a super-mom, and feeling guilty that I wasn’t doing enough. But part of success is learning how to communicate what you need and want. You don’t have to do it all.” 

Claire then shared with us a fragment of an empowering article: Why Being A Mom is Enough.

Women of Chronosphere: Tech marketing 

Product Marketing Manager, Gibbs Cullen

Gibbs gave attendees an overview of her unlikely transition from being an art history major, to a Product Manager at AWS (Amazon Web Services). 

“After the five-year mark (with Amazon), I started to think about other opportunities outside of the company. When a recruiter from Chronosphere reached out, I was really excited. I joined as a Developer Advocate, which is a role that we built based off of my strengths. Recently, I moved into my new position as a Product Marketing Manager. I think it’s very cool and exciting that Chronosphere offers the opportunity to try different avenues.” 

Gibbs shared three key pieces of wisdom that she’s learned during her career in tech: 

Head of Product and Technical Marketing, Rachel Dines

Gibbs handed it over to Rachel, who coincidentally also studied art history and also double majored in computer science. Rachel dove into the timeline of her career in tech – from the old boys club of being a Principal Analyst at Forrester to her current role as Chronosphere’s Head of Product and Technical Marketing – and what she learned while overcoming obstacles (both personally and professionally) throughout her career: 

“The first thing that I always come back to as a leader, manager, peer and employee – is that we are humans first, and we are people first. I never want to work for an organization that loses sight of that. The well-being of the person that works with me is the single most important thing.” 

Donations and other ways Chronosphere supports

Attendees were able to vote on the organization that would receive our IWD event’s $5K donation. Voices of Children, a far-reaching organization that will assist children in Ukraine, won the vote – but we didn’t stop there. As a surprise, Chronosphere pledged to additionally donate $5K to Girls Who Code. Also, Martin and Rob each personally matched Chronosphere’s donation, bringing the total to $10K for each organization.

Other ways Chronosphere contributes: 

Breaking the Bias is a long-term goal

We ended our International Women’s Day event with a few minutes of Q&A from guests that joined us. We enjoyed thoughtful dialogue from different backgrounds, found renewed commitment and inspiration from one another, and came together to learn more about each other’s experiences. Breaking the bias is not a one-day feat accomplished in celebration of women, but rather something that we, as a company, strive for on a regular basis – within our teams, within our personal lives, and more importantly, within our community. 

Want to keep up with the latest at Chronosphere, and stay tuned for more events? Follow us on Twitter @chronosphereio and check out our blogs on our site. 

Last fall, the e-commerce company where I had been SVP of people ops and talent for nearly four years, had been bought by a behemoth, and I arrived at one of those career crossroads with a big decision to make: Where should I go next? Working for a large company gave me pause – I thrive in the scrappy startup environment where I can make an impact by creating structure in the midst of chaos. It was an optimal time to think about the next level of career challenges to go after.

This forced the reflection of what was important to me in my next move: strong leadership, mission, market opportunity. Chronosphere came out of nowhere – a dark horse in the running that quickly became my number one. 

Leadership

My first encounter with Chronosphere leadership was a meeting with its co-founder and CEO, Martin Mao. I hesitated in taking the meeting because Chronosphere was earlier-stage than I was after, but I was intrigued with Martin’s background (so grateful that I decided to take the call). As he shared about Chronosphere’s history and path for the future, I think I took six pages of notes. I listened, mesmerized by his obvious mix of high IQ and EQ- I was wowed. As someone that loves to surround myself with smart and kind people, these are key qualities that I am drawn to.

Then I met the rest of the leadership team: There was not one person I spoke with that I wasn’t absolutely excited to work with.

And it didn’t stop there. Co-founder and CTO, Rob Skillington, made the drive up from New York to Boston just to meet me face-to-face. Words cannot describe how strongly that action resonated with me. I haven’t even mentioned the thoughtful surprise that showed up on my porch after my intro with Martin. Soccer is huge in my family (Vamos Argentina!) which came up in passing during an interview with Martin … Voilà, out of the blue I received an Argentina soccer jersey. It wasn’t the jersey that bowled me over, but instead the level of intentionality and thoughtfulness that went into this.

This whole blog could probably be about how big a role leadership was in my decision to join Chronosphere.

But there is more!

Opportunity

Having just been through the excitement of a mega exit, I was primed to do it again! Looking at Chronosphere and where this company was going, I could see it was theirs to lose. 

Here are some quick facts that show how joining Chronosphere was a no-brainer:

Strong Mission 

I also wanted to join a company with a strong mission, and while Chronosphere doesn’t beat its chest re: its mission, what I saw (and continue to see) is a level of authentic care for the people that build this company. For a company that is only 2+ years old, the benefits they had in place were demonstrative of how equitability and inclusion are not just buzzwords, but an authentic part of the culture. I knew I wanted to be part of the team to shape this mission and who we want to be in the observability space. 

Recently, Chronosphere’s swift and compassionate reaction to war breaking out in Ukraine is a perfect example of who we are. We’ve been setting aside time as a company to talk about how we can contribute  – both as individuals and as an organization at large. We are also encouraged to set aside time for ourselves to process what’s happening, and most inspiring has been the way we have embraced our EU team. 

Amazing Ride

This is less tangible than the proof points I listed above, but I could see Chronosphere was going to be an amazing ride and I was going to learn new things … if I joined. I have worked in the SaaS space before, but infrastructure was new to me and let’s be honest – the cloud-native space is white hot right now and that is exciting! In the end I found myself debating between what I thought I wanted and the opportunity in front of me – bottom line, I just imagined my life a year in the future, and when I imagined not taking the Chronosphere role, I was filled with a deep regret, and that is when I knew.  

Conclusion

I’ve been with Chronosphere for five months now and am reminded constantly why I made the right decision in joining the team. Each day here has demonstrated that you cannot go wrong if you listen to your gut. The commitment to humans, to what we are building and in service of our customers is unmatched. 

Chronosphere is growing fast, and we are looking for exceptional people to join in helping us continue building an exciting company in an exciting space. Check out our careers page to see if there’s a role for you!

The past 12 months have been explosive for adoption of cloud-native technologies as year-two of the pandemic continued to fuel demand for new types of services, and companies hustled to quickly respond with new apps and features. In fact, according to Gartner, growth of end-user spending on public cloud services grew from about $315 billion in 2020 to an estimated $396 billion in 2021 and is forecasted to keep growing to $482 billion this year. 

None of this comes as a surprise to Chronosphere as our observability platform is needed now more than ever to help cloud-native companies solve their observability challenges. From our Series C Funding round, to becoming a unicorn, to more than doubling our workforce size (and more!), the past 12 months have been very exciting for Chronosphere.

As we head into 2022, we’d like to reflect on 10 of our major accomplishments of the past 12 months. Take a peek at our top highlights. 

1- Series C funding

Last October, Chronosphere shared the huge news that we raised $200 million in a Series C funding round, bringing our funding total to $255 million. 

In a sit down with theCube at last year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021, Chronosphere co-founder and CEO, Martin Mao, talked about how excited we were to share our Series C funding news and how it will enable Chronosphere to continue our rapid pace of growth: “With this $200 million Series C funding, we want to continue growing the company. We’re hiring across the board – on the engineering side, go-to-market side, and elsewhere. We’re just continuing to meet that demand.” 

Check out theCube: Martin Mao talks $200M funding, distributed tracing for a recap of their entire conversation or to watch the whole video.

2- Unicorn status

In October, we reached another major milestone – we became a unicorn! Sure – there are lots of unicorns these days. But Chronosphere is a special kind of unicorn – we reached unicorn level very quickly and with a very small team. This milestone put Chronosphere in the top 10 fastest B2B SaaS companies to disclose unicorn status in September 2021, according to Pitchbook.

In his blog, Why Chronosphere is the rarest kind of unicorn, Martin writes about why Chronosphere’s unicorn status is unique, and why there’s more to our story than a $1 billion-plus valuation. “We reached unicorn level with a team of only 80 people, most of whom joined during the past year … and in the midst of a pandemic. The textbook term for a unicorn team this size is “tiny.” Small as it is, the team of 80 is world class, which has made it possible to reach this milestone, and as fast as we did.” 

3- Rapid growth

The past 12 months were a period of rapid growth for Chronosphere, with consecutive quarter-over-quarter record growth valued at more than $1 billion. We are on pace to be one of the fastest B2B SaaS companies to go from $1 million to $50 million in ARR, faster than well-known SaaS companies like Datadog, CrowdStrike, and Confluent.

Chronosphere’s record momentum is summed up in today’s announcement:

To go deeper on details about Chronosphere’s growth and milestones over the past 12 months read today’s news update, Chronosphere Saw Consecutive Quarter-Over-Quarter Record Growth Over the Past 12 Months, Valued at More Than $1 Billion.

We can’t fail to mention how we got here and how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time. 

In May 2021, Chronosphere celebrated its second birthday pandemic-style via Zoom. Martin captured the moment in his blog, Happy Second Birthday, Chronosphere! when he wrote: “Two years might seem like a short amount of time, but in cloud-native and startup years it’s an eternity. Our workforce is increasing by double digits, we are growing our family of (happy) customers, and we are becoming a household name in monitoring and observability.”

Our third anniversary is just around this corner … stay tuned for more fun birthday updates. 

4- Distributed tracing launch

We continued to surprise and delight our customers in different ways – like adding distributed tracing to our observability platform. 

In his blog summarizing our observability platform’s new distributed tracing capability – Chronosphere adds tracing data to its observability platform – Product Manager, Joel Groen, dives into how we use distributed trace data in conjunction with metrics data to provide deeper insight into alerting, triage, and root cause analysis. 

Joel writes, “The ability to capture, store and view every distributed trace that matters provides a level of fidelity previously missing in the industry. The power of metric and distributed trace data together elevates both for engineers who use them everyday — especially when it comes to root cause analysis. We deliver it all with a single platform designed for engineers who want to ask simple questions about their data without compromising the extensibility to generate complex queries for power users.” 

With our distributed tracing capabilities, Chronosphere customers can: 

5- New features for our customers

We also announced a few key features that further help our customers with their observability challenges. 

6- Partnerships

Chronosphere also managed a handful of successful partnerships, from PagerDuty to strengthen the alert system to GKE Autopilot for triage.

Each of these partnerships backs us on our mission statement: to accelerate global innovation by providing organizations with the building blocks to achieve higher operational excellence. 

7- Remote-first workforce

Chronosphere established itself as a remote-first company, which means our workforce is distributed across the US and the EU and we are able to search the globe for the best people to join our team. 

Our three main hubs are located in New York City, Vilnius, Lithuania and Seattle, Washington (our newest office). However, as a remote-first company, our team has the flexibility to work fully remote or at one of our hub offices. You can read more on Chronosphere’s unique approach to remote-first hiring in a blog by our Head of HR, Agne Klasaviciene, What it takes to grow a remote-first startup during a pandemic.

Martin talked more about what remote-first means for our culture and ability to grow our workforce efficiently when he wrote: “First we became a remote-first company, which means we believe in giving employees the freedom and flexibility to work from the place where they will be happiest and most productive. Our employees can choose the work location that fits them best, whether that’s at home, a co-working space, or a hub office.” 

Read all about office reopenings and our unique approach keeping our distributed workforce connected in Martin’s blog, Chronosphere milestones: Office openings and in-person gatherings.

 8- In-person conferences

In October 2021, the Chronosphere team was able to join nearly fifteen thousand folks in LA for the in-person Kubecon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 conference – finally! Our booth was a hit, and we got to demo a preview of our new distributed tracing capabilities

Events and sessions from the conference included:

To read more about what happened at KubeCon LA, read: 

9- Customers, customers, customers

We had a great time helping our growing list of customers – such as Doordash, Genius Sports, Tecton, PlanetScale, Aurora, Cudo Ventures, and Abnormal Security – with their observability challenges.

We’ve enjoyed watching our customers grow as well:

Our Head of Customer Success, Joby Babu, captured the magic of Chronosphere and how we are helping customers succeed in his blog, Why I Joined Chronosphere As Head of Customer Success, when he wrote: “Chronosphere puts control in the hands of the customers, giving them complete control over metric retention, resolution, and aggregation based on the environment or team. The Chronosphere control plane allows customers to roll-up, aggregate, drop, or relabel incoming metrics with certain labels before they are retained. This helps companies meet their key observability objectives by spending less, and realizing values faster.” 

Stay tuned to this space as we continue to share more about our customers.

10- Chronut traditions

…What are they? We’re dying to know! 

As a team, we make sure to have some fun while maintaining an engaging atmosphere –  where everyone can connect and create meaningful memories. As part of our strategy to mimic the in-person experience for our distributed workforce, we created Chronut traditions in the form of a variety of team events, such as: 

✔️ Celebrating our company milestones together on Zoom with something a little special, like food and swag (like our virtual May birthday party – number three is coming up, stay tuned!)

✔️ Chronuts: Employees are introduced to new teammates in virtual “get to know you” sessions on Zoom. 

✔️Slack channels dedicated to open discussions around everything from food and pets to topical issues.

✔️ A “Kudos” Slack channel, where we give a shoutout to team members that have accomplished something great (and then get rewarded with a gift card of their choice!) 

✔️Chronojams – where anyone can share their playlist as they work remotely! 

✔️ Celebrating Australia Day (shoutout to our founders!) and March Madness.

✔️Sending our team the best swag and gifts (this holiday season we beat the cold with Smores and customized All Birds slippers!) Check out how cool (or warm) we look!

It’s been a busy time at Chronosphere, and as we look back and reflect, we can’t help but be grateful for our fantastic team and all of our successes.

So- what’s in store for the next 12 months? With Chronosphere’s rapid growth and product innovation, we know it will be something special.

Sophie Kohler was a key contributor to this article.