LiveTiles: No Regrets
The Last 5 Years in Pictures
Today is my last day at LiveTiles.
The last 5 years, 3 months, and 19 days have been the most turbulent and triumphant of my career. I went from meeting an Australian man at Fuse Accelerator one morning to flying around the world, building a multi-million dollar product, and growing an amazing team along the way. Across the half-decade at LiveTiles, I’ve learned so much about enterprise collaboration, planet-scale technology, and landing Fortune 500 customers. Most of all, I want people living in small towns like mine to know that hard work can get you anywhere you want to go amongst the vast opportunities in startups.
2015
As I’ve written about before, the early days were constant challenges in a new environment. We were one outpost amongst many around the world, communicating online and feeling like the rocket may not hit the stratosphere because it’s leaking fuel on the launch pad at a prodigious rate.
I was coming aboard as the first technical hire — about employee #15 , before our series A and while still running on seed money— with one developer with me. Together we had the modest goal of rebuilding the SharePoint drag & drop design product to hit the first million in revenue within one year. While doing that, we were doing customer support, supplying technical information to investor pitches, and supporting the ability for sales to track (and turn off) customers using our product.
In the first year, I was whisked away to New York City for my first LiveTiles off-site. Getting to see the big apple and sit down with leaders from around the globe to talk about business strategy was the first of many trips I was lucky to take with LiveTiles. In New York, I was offered drugs by a random man in Time Square, stayed up until 7AM bar-hopping for the first time in my life, and saw the skyline from the top of the Empire State Building.
While more and more can be done online, the intense collaboration required in the world of technology — from product ideation sessions to sales meetings and more — often led to face-to-face meetings. I’m far from the furthest traveled person I’ve met, yet I’ve been enough places to lose count. I’ve included more pictures of some in this post.
2016
With the release of the new version of our SharePoint design tool, 2016 was a real inflection point. It kicked off geometric growth that persists to this day.
As awareness and interest raced toward decisions at companies around the world, this was a time where I started to not only lead the product team but do more and more sales engineering work. I would hop on Skype calls with prospective customers, sometimes continuing to code while the salesperson did their presentation, then do demos and answer questions.
On the product side, we didn’t rest on our laurels of having a leading SharePoint tool that has millions of licensed users around the world to this day. We knew we had to go beyond the Microsoft ecosystem while leveraging the best parts of our technical knowledge on the platform. This led to my visiting Australia to design a new SaaS product to take LiveTiles into every organization in the world. I spent my time on the plane reading about emerging Azure capabilities and performance limitations of key systems, applying the knowledge over two days of whiteboarding. Then, I visited Steve Irwin’s zoo and got to be three inches away from a koala.
2017
With the announcement of Artificial Intelligence initiatives going on inside of LiveTiles and our presence in the industry expanding, 2017 was the biggest single-year for standing on a stage for me at LiveTiles. I presented in Las Vegas, Chicago, and Orlando to name a few to enough people I would finally call a “crowd”. Technical evangelism combined the best of my technical skills and extroverted personality, setting up a lot of opportunities for LiveTiles that played out over the following year.
Hustle and luck on the sales side came together when we reached 4 million in revenue in 2017 — just 2 years in.
We were growing at a huge pace, seeing new faces every event, and talking to a wide range of customers, partners, and potential employees. All of this had finally reached a scale where I suddenly realized something: the show Silicon Valley was a documentary. Virtually everyone in the company loved the SV, but at a certain point in 2017, I watched an episode and thought to myself “this is how Motley Crue felt watching This is Spinal Tap”.
2018
Kicking off the year we continued the tradition of an annual new product from my team with “LiveTiles Intelligence”, an analytics platform for measuring engagement with your users. It harnessed emerging server-less cloud technology and to this day tracks user interactions for hundreds of thousands of users.
We debuted the final version at the first gathering of all LiveTiles employees in Hawaii in 2018. That was a whirlwind week of strategizing with leadership on the future of the company, envisioning the next wave of products from the team, and announcing we had reached 10 million in revenue. One morning Trey — whose feet you saw in the first image — and I absconded with some of our Australian coworkers to try surfing for the first time on Waikiki.
Having worked non-stop on the Intelligence product leading to Hawaii, and having exhausted myself during the trip, I hit a total burnout in 2018. It was the worst I felt in my life. I’ll suffice to say it was a hard struggle, LiveTiles supported me with extraordinarily with extra time off, and that I’ve benefitted in the two years since from a new sense of balance and purpose that comes with realizing I’m only human.
The last accomplishment of 2018 was hearing about our potential acquisition of Wizdom, a Danish software company in the same enterprise collaboration space as LiveTiles. I knew them from their #1 ranking years earlier in one of the key industry reports and it was an honor working with their team over in Europe. Joel Rieck and I gave the all-clear and $50 million dollars later, Wizdom joined the LiveTiles group of companies to unite the top intranet product in the world with the fastest-growing company in Australia.
2019
Hot off the final wave of hiring we had been able to do in Tri-Cities, 2019 was definitely the beginning of a new process of maturing the company. From the first all-company training to kicking off an integration strategy amongst the disparate products, the “grow in every direction” chaos of years previous was giving way to a new focus. I’ve worked for large companies and dispersed companies, but the challenge ahead for LiveTiles is building a large, dispersed company.
Now entering a time of consistent evolution, rather than constant revolution, the US product team began planning a slow and steady revamp of our product suite. Beginning with a new creative process with Design Sprints, we co-created a new direction of the drag & drop design experience, ready to elevate it above the competition.
Due to events being canceled this year, 2019 would also be the last year where I attended events on behalf of LiveTiles. The highlight was my last outing as the frontman for the LiveTiles band. From surprising Karl, the CEO of LiveTiles, with my rendition of “Separate Ways” in a karaoke bar in Seattle, to a modest three-song set in NYC in 2016, we had evolved our rock chops to the point of doing 2 hours in the 1923 Bourbon Bar in the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. It was my most unforgettable experience.
2020
Continuing our string of accomplishments, 2020 was the year we reached $50 million in revenue. The last hire was made for the US products team and we were working hammer-and-tongs to deliver the latest tranche of features for our biggest customer on LiveTiles Cloud. But another event happened around the same time in 2020. As a great philosopher once said, “life got flipped turned upside down”.
Working from home in 2020Q2, we read about being recognized by Forrester Wave as a “Strong Performer” in the category of Intranet Platforms alongside our partner Microsoft and even beating old rivals like Unily and big industry titans like Atlassian. Less than a month later the pandemic shutdowns and foreign exchange fluctuations between Australian and US dollars forced LiveTiles to let go of as many US employees as possible — including my team and myself.
This last half-year at LiveTiles has been the strangest in my life. A global pandemic immediately shocked the business world, everyone was working from home, then the fallout from the economic contraction has led to today: my last day at LiveTiles.
Across all of my time at LiveTiles, and all of the accolades and once-in-a-lifetime experience, the best was putting together the best team I’ve ever worked with.
Most of us from a small desert town where virtually no one knows — and some people don’t even believe — we made something that supports 8.5 million people around the world.
The entire population of Washington State…plus 1.5 million more people!
Forward
I remember February 2015, standing in my kitchen with my wife, scrolling through LiveTiles.Nyc — at the time a very roughly put together page— and thinking to myself, “The only thing I know is they have a good idea and $80 dollars for a Squarespace website”. My decision at the time, and mantra for the first year, was “90% of startups fail, I can always find a job in 9 months”.
Here we are 5 years, 3 months, and 19 days later.
I may never get another chance to do any of this again. It took me three jobs to find LiveTiles after committing to the transition from working for the government to one-day working for myself. While I may never get a chance to speak at Microsoft Ignite again, open for Tone Loc at an NYC concert, or help close the deal at the largest athletics company in the world again, I take aware experience on how I might do it again for myself.
I am thankful for my days and nights dreaming of digital workplaces.
I absolutely learned what it takes to turn a pitch into a worldwide platform, gather and grow a world-class team, and take on a worldview that opportunity is everywhere. Even a little place like Tri-Cities, WA can have a global impact.
I was certainly changed — for the better — through my time at LiveTiles. The last paragraph of every LiveTiles investor announcement had us right alongside places like New York, Zurich, and London. I don’t need to cross the world to change it — I can start right here.
Erik Ralston is an innovator with 13 years of experience, 5 years in leadership at the fastest growing tech company in Australia, a BS in Computer Science from Washington State University, and too many ventures to mention in one biography. Erik is also co-founder of Fuse Accelerator in Tri-Cities, WA where he works on connecting people and sharing knowledge to turn new ideas into growing startups. You can find him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or the next Fuse event — once Benton county hits its milestones for Phase 2
