Page 8 - SSD Nodes Celebrates 7-year Anniversary

We have a blog where we write a lot of really incredible tutorials on there, about many different
ways to do different things. We
have a security guide on there

as well, which gives you a PDF
that tells you the 6 steps to
secure your server, which
anybody, even people who are
not using our services, should
read. We regularly publish
tutorials, and that helps a lot.

Joe Dager: You started as a one-man band. What was it like hiring your first and second and
others? What was it like when you started hiring people? Was there this big trust thing that you
had? It's pretty sensitive types of information you're handling for people.

Matt Connor: It's really scary when you're first starting out and then you're hiring because you're
giving other people access. Of course, I think the best way to do it is to give a little bit at a time
and build trust with these people—especially in really new roles—slowly give the keys to them,
and see how they manage at that level, and then a little bit more, and a little bit more. And

course-correction is needed, but it's really scary in the beginning. You realize you have a lot less
control than you thought. So, putting together a formalized structure, I think that's really
important. But it doesn't have to be super formal.

Our company is arguably flat right now, and I think that gives people latitude to do the things
they need to get their jobs done. They have an accountability structure, but outside of that we
don't have a formalized management structure, besides me, and I think that really helps a lot
with giving people the control and the accountability parts. You just need to make sure that

everything is flowing smoothly.

We have processes in place, and we have customers that are involved in that. We have feedback
emails that go after tickets, so we can see how the customer felt that ticket was handled. I think
stuff like that is really important, but you can easily get locked down in process. I think we keep
the company pretty lean—adding too much process would slow us down.

Joe Dager: You're scaling pretty quickly. I always remember that Mario Andretti said, "If you feel
like you're in control, you're just not going fast enough," or something. You have to be on edge,
pushing the edge a little bit. Do you feel like that at times?

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