SalesTechStar Interview with Kip Turco, CEO at StackPath

For some technology and SaaS providers, 2020 turned out to be a banner year in several ways, Kip Turco talks about StackPath’s successful journey through the pandemic (and how they bagged their biggest deal!) in this quick chat:

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Hi Kip, welcome to SalesTechStar! We’d love to hear about StackPath and your latest expansion plans in LatAm. Any other upcoming (exciting!) plans to talk about for the year? 

We are excited to announce that we expanded our global footprint with four new edge locations in Latin America – Buenos Aires, Argentina; Santiago, Chile; Bogota, Colombia; and Lima, Peru. This brings StackPath to 50+ edge locations strategically located in 35 of the most populated markets across five continents. Another step in our quest to get developers and enterprises workloads closer in proximity to even more end users. In 2021, we look to continue expanding our network and serving the needs of our market; particularly gaming and media/entertainment companies as they look to add capacity and footprint even more rapidly in a COVID world.

What was 2020 like for StackPath through the pandemic? Can you talk about the global team’s response and core challenges, learning’s?

While not making light of what has been a dark time for many companies and individuals, StackPath had an outstanding 2020. We announced our latest funding raise; have been working tirelessly to improve our platform, infrastructure, and services; and met the challenge to keep pace with record demand we’ve seen as a result of a global community leaning on our types of products for digitally working and playing at home.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Jake Athey, VP Marketing and Customer Experience at Widen

Take us through a few initiatives undertaken at StackPath in 2020 to improve both the employee and customer experience in light of the pandemic?

Of great importance and yet little fanfare, lots of action has taken place just so our customers experience what feels like “business as usual” during the pandemic. It has been an ongoing effort to ensure our platform is optimized and highly performant for today’s demand, with an eye on tomorrow’s. Conversely, we know for our employees, the experience can feel very different working entirely remotely. To ensure our team still feels connected, in the know, and a part of a whole, we have implemented a number of new activities, such as monthly All-Hands, a Lunch & Learn series, and virtual social events.

Can you talk about some of your most successful sales and marketing outcomes in 2020 at StackPath: a few learnings to share?

In 2020 we signed one of our biggest customers to date. While we are not in a position to divulge the customer’s name, it is representative of not just a continued, but accelerated stream of interest in and need for compute and delivery resources at the cloud’s edge. While gaming and media/entertainment continues to lead the way, we anticipate other industries will be close behind, including IoT, AdTech, AR/VR, IIoT, blockchain, and more. Lastly, I believe we’ve had some success in helping the industry better define “the edge”. With so much buzz and so many companies claiming to be edge, its hard to know what is signal versus noise. Our work is still not done here, but the more the market comes to understand the cloud’s edge, the better it will pick up on those who claim edge versus are edge. And I like our odds as that day arrives…