http://www.huddler.com

That first pic is of me and my brother and Co-founder, Ted, outside Huddler’s first office in 2007. It was just the two of us back then, working for free out of our living room, next door to a strip club in Redwood city. Inauspicious beginnings to say the least.

The other two are of the off-sites we recently held for Huddler employees for both our San Francisco and Reston offices. I’m not at all ashamed to admit how proud these pictures make me feel. Over 5 years, we have been so fortunate to be joined by 55 brilliant, dedicated, fun, friendly people that have put us in position to be one of the most influential media companies in the world. We’ve grown from 1 site with 0 monthly visitors to now 34 sites serving nearly 24 million visitors each month, and as we continue to invest in user experience and content that delights our users, we see no ceiling for what we can do.

If you’re on this site, you’re likely aware that there are a lot of startups out here in San Francisco, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say there have been moments over the last 5 years where one of us would wonder if ours had the steam and power to pull ahead of the competition. There were definitely a couple of nights where one of us would look to the other, point at numbers that weren’t what we wanted, and wonder when we’d hit critical mass. From day 1 though, the rebuke was always the same: Huddler just makes sense. For our users, whose appetite for their passions has been the real fuel behind our growth. For marketers, to whom we’re offering direct access to the influencers they want the most. For the folks who built our forums from nothing into the incredibly vital hubs they are today, who see the metrics they care about go up when they join the Huddler family. As crowded as the startup space could seem, we just couldn’t get over our conviction that a 3-way win-win had to be a good idea. So far so good.

While we’re thrilled with where we are and where we’re going, we feel incredibly fortunate to live in a city where we are routinely dazzled and humbled by our friends’ and neighbors’ ideas. But, I have to say, I feel even more fortunate to have had an idea we knew could go the distance, and to have had this team to build it with.

Have we changed the world? Maybe not yet. But from the millions of people that have found close friends with whom they can engage about their passions daily, to the hundreds of millions of people that are exposed to our content annually, we count ourselves fortunate to be where we are.