Billy of the Week: Chris Aker

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
They sold it for $900 million in cash. They don't really mention much about the company other than it was doing over $100 million in revenue. What they don't mention is the guy who started it, he bootstrapped it, raised no outside money, and owned 100% of it.

**Shaan Puri** (0:15)
All the way through the sale?

**Sam Parr** (0:16)
All the way through the sale, owned 100% of it.

**Shaan Puri** (0:19)
A million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool?

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
A billion dollars.
So let me tell you this quick story. This was not a big headline. I bet you didn't even see it.
So my friend, I was in college at the time. He's a little bit, he's older than me. So he was not in college. He was probably in his 30s when I was 21 He started this company called Linode. Did you see yesterday a company called Linode was acquired for 900 million dollars in cash?

**Shaan Puri** (0:48)
Yeah, who bought it? It was.

**Sam Parr** (0:51)
Is it called Akamai?

**Shaan Puri** (0:52)
Akamai, yeah.

**Sam Parr** (0:53)
Akamai. And so they bought it for nine, everything I'm going to say is relatively public or you could piece it together in a bunch of different articles. But basically they sold it for 900 million dollars in cash. They don't really mention much about the company other than it was doing over a hundred million in revenue. What they don't mention is the guy who started it, he bootstrapped it, raised no outside money and owned 100% of it. So his name is Chris.
I knew him when I was in college.

**Shaan Puri** (1:21)
All the way through the sale?

**Sam Parr** (1:23)
All the way through the sale, owned 100% of it.
The company, all right, let me give you a little bit background. I think when they sold, they had like 300-ish employees, but throughout their existence, they had a relatively small staff. Like they were doing like multiple millions of dollars in revenue per employee. And it wasn't run like a family business, but almost kind of like a family business based out of New Jersey. So basically this guy-

**Shaan Puri** (1:45)
What does it do? What is Linode?

**Sam Parr** (1:47)
So I'm not in this space, so excuse me, but basically it's like the generic term is it's cloud computing. So basically before Amazon Web Services was around, Linode was there. And I think some of their customers are like Walmart. So they help host applications and websites is the non-techie version that I would say. But are you looking at the website? What's it say?

**Shaan Puri** (2:11)
I'm looking at the website. It basically says, cut your cloud bill and your cloud bill in half.
It's basically like deploy Linux servers in the cloud is the idea. I think we use this, by the way, at my previous startup. I remember seeing a bill for Linode.

**Sam Parr** (2:23)
Probably. They're pretty popular, but they, because they were bootstrapped, they couldn't quite keep up with like, once it was the other competitor, I think Digital Ocean, which is like publicly traded now for multi-billions. But basically in the early 2000s, like 2005 or 2006, Chris worked at this company called Healthstream, which was, it's not important, it was just a boring company.
And he worked in like with computers, with tech, and he grew up with an Apple and loved tinkering with computers, but what he noticed was that hosting was really expensive. So he basically locked himself in his apartment from like 2002 to 2003, and like had a year's worth of savings and like locked himself in this apartment to code and build this website. And he's like, if it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. And so he launches it and right away, it does good enough to pay his salary, like single digit hundreds of thousands of dollars by year two, because this was in early 2000s. I don't even think Amazon Web Services was around at this point. And if it was, it was like brand new. And in fact, this whole idea of cloud computing was brand new at Healthstream. Chris was like, look, we've got to like spend all this money to buy servers. What if we just like bought a bunch of servers and rented it out to people? And that was like the idea, because it's really hard for a small business who doesn't want to create a bunch of servers in their office to like actually host a website, host applications, things like that. So that's where the idea came from.
And so it grew like a little bit year over year. It wasn't growing like crazy for a long time, but it was doing okay. Chris kind of was always obsessed with automation. So we did a really good job of automating a lot of the parts of the company.