$250M ARR Was Never the Goal. It Came From Staying True to Our Mission.

A quarter-billion in revenue makes folks want to talk about growth. I get it. Growth gives you room to build. It lets you make bigger bets, hire more experts, take bigger swings, and reach more of those you set out to help in the first place.

Numbers like that are exciting to see. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but that's not what hits me the hardest.

What hits me is everything behind that number. The businesses that were getting hammered by unchecked adversaries. The years when protecting them at scale felt almost impossible. The partners who helped us reach them (and trusted us while we were still figuring it out). The teammates who rallied behind this work at a breakneck pace, with families behind them making sacrifices most of us will never know. And the investors who believed this was the right thing to do, even when the masses had their doubts.

These are the things I keep coming back to when I see $250M ARR.

The first million was proof of what's possible

Back in 2015, Chris Bisnett, John Ferrell, and I found a cause worth dedicating our lives to—so we took a leap of faith and founded Huntress (then known as Huntress Labs). Along the way, more like-minded misfits joined us, and by 2018, we protected nearly 80,000 businesses and crossed $1M ARR.

Compared to today, that probably sounds small. I promise you it didn't feel small then 😅.

Getting to that point was tough. Really tough. For me, that first million wasn't proof we'd made it, but it was the first real sign that this experiment of ours had legs.

Businesses below the Fortune 500 truly needed what we were building. The community was telling us their pain was real. So we stayed close to the ones we were trying to help and worked like hell not to drift from our purpose. That was the whole point. It still is.