Below is information originally written by PowerToFly Partner Packet. Go to Packet's page on PowerToFly to see their open positions and learn more.
About Us
Packet empowers developer-driven companies to deploy physical infrastructure at global scale. We get out of bed each day driven to help SaaS companies and Fortune 100's alike make infrastructure a competitive advantage with automated bare metal that can be deployed anywhere.
Launched in 2014 by industry veterans, Packet set out to build a better internet. The plan was simple: bring hyperscale infrastructure capabilities to the rest of us. By providing a seamless API experience for bare metal (including in our global public cloud as well as against custom hardware, on-premises infrastructure, and compute at the edge) we have attracted thousands of users and over 800 Enterprise accounts that trust us as a foundation of their business.
At Packet we believe cloud infrastructure is a craft — not a commodity — and that every packet matters. As such, we are committed to developing trusting and deep relationships with our customers, our communities, and the broader ecosystem. We listen, learn, engage, and share. Whatever we do, we strive to add value. In a world defined by faceless megacorps, we're proud to say that "Packet is the cloud that knows your name."
Headquartered in New York City with satellite offices worldwide, our distributed culture is made possible by more than 130 team members across 10 countries.
Founding Story
In 2014 the cloud industry was consolidating around a handful of giants operating at hyperscale. Each was running essentially the same virtualized, verticalized playbook.
Packet's co-founders (twin brothers Zac and Jacob Smith) saw a fast-approaching future in which complex real-time applications would permeate every facet of our lives. They knew that these "at scale" experiences would demand infrastructure far different than the first wave of the cloud: instead of centralized generic compute and storage, they would need infrastructure that was more specialized, diverse and distributed.
Once they started digging, they found four other "once in a generation" shifts at play:
- A new golden age of silicon, driven by a distributed computing architecture.
- The rollout of new wireless technologies (5G, CBRS, etc) in a mobile-first world.
- A power transfer from an I.T. buyer to a developer/millennial buyer.
- The rise of a consolidated class of technology-enabled Enterprises.
By focusing on subscale instead of hyperscale and investing in a non-verticalized model, they believed an upstart with the right vision could level the playing field. Scratched on the back of a NYC beer garden napkin, Packet's mission came into focus: automate hardware — no matter what it was, where it lived, or who owned it — and ensure that the experience would delight a developer.
The first order of business was to become relevant to the software ecosystem and developers. We opened our first public cloud datacenter in Parsippany, NJ in 2015, offering a curated set of bare metal configurations available in minutes. Three more locations followed in 2016, and by 2017 we had a global footprint with 20 pins on the map. We published a public roadmap and released features in response to customer feedback: elastic IPs, cloud-init support, local and global BGP, Terraform and Ansible providers, Custom iPXE, and more.
In 2019 our customer base grew to include top Enterprises and SaaS platforms and we expanded our product suite to include Edge and On-Premises options. A highlight of the year was deploying the infrastructure for Sprint's Curiosity IoT product: the first dedicated, virtualized and distributed IoT core network.
Success doesn't happen in a vacuum — it takes a village. Ours includes:
- The commitment of our employees, who live and work in over 10 countries.
- Outstanding leadership, with decades of industry experience.
- Leading investors, including SoftBank, Third Point, Dell Technologies Capital, Battery Ventures, & Samsung.
- The trust of hundreds of open source projects, including Golang, Kernel.org, and PostgreSQL.
Our True North
We're always looking for great people to support our vision: employees, customers, partners, and investors.
If you would like to learn more about Packet, we would love to chat with you. Please make time to stop by our NYC headquarters, or schedule time with a member of our customer team.
