Building for the Fortune 500,000: 80% to go…

To the Sentry community -

It was sixteen years ago that David Cramer pushed the first commit to a side project, and twelve years ago when he and Chris Jennings turned this side project into a company that exists to solve a simple problem: making debugging any software issue dead simple. Since then, we’ve been on a path slightly different from what most people consider “observability.” Sentry isn’t a platform or a company that wants to collect logs and check a monitoring box. Twelve years later, we’re still laser-focused on one key problem: simplifying debuggability for developers. But more importantly, we can’t do this without the support from our developer community.

With that, I’m happy to share two recent milestones: we now support over 100,000 organizations and we passed $100 million in ARR last year.

Great, but why should you care? It’s a fair question; both are just arbitrary round numbers. But these milestones aren’t just an excuse to pat ourselves on the back, quite the opposite. So we’ll skip the navel-gazing and instead focus on what’s next for you and Sentry (and if that’s not enough, we have a fun way to celebrate with our community, but before I get to that, please bear with me).

Sentry: the team

In 2019, David Cramer hired me to lead Sentry as he transitioned from CEO to CTO. So far, so good. Today, Cramer and I are pleased to welcome Dave Rosenthal, who joins Sentry as our next CTO; Cramer will transition into the newly created Chief Product Officer role. Dave has experience as both a startup founder and an engineering leader at some of the world’s most innovative companies. He started earlier this month and we’re thrilled to have him on the team. Meanwhile, read more from Cramer about his official title change to CPO. (I say “official” because, in many ways, he’s always been the CPO at Sentry).

Sentry: the product

Sentry initially gained traction because it solved developers’ problems. And what started off as an open-source side project for Cramer grew into a company that allows more than 100,000 organizations and millions of developers to ship with confidence. From the beginning, and even today, Sentry focuses on two outcomes: finding and solving. We enable developers to not only know about a problem but also show them how to fix issues in their workflow, in real time. This is why Sentry is a trusted solution for more than 100,000 organizations, and doubling down on this philosophy is how we’ll grow to serve the next 100,000 and beyond.

Sentry’s version of the ideal developer assistant will help you debug your problems with all relevant context available at your fingertips. You will continue to see us iterate on surfacing the most important issues in your workflow, where you work (think PR comment) and providing the sharpest connected view of signals that help you fix software issues quickly. So, if you end up on an issue but need a video-like reproduction of the issue or need to investigate a span waterfall, you can easily debug any kind of problem using Sentry’s data streams.

Many companies achieve success with a bottoms-up strategy (sometimes called product-led growth, or PLG), then when they get to scale, they flip a switch and start selling to (and building for) enterprise buyers. Not Sentry. PLG is a thought leadership exercise, anyway. If you’re not building the absolute best product you can bring to market—regardless of your sales strategy—why are you even in business? We don’t add features to our products to meet some imagined “persona.” Sentry is a developer tool, period. Sentry not only builds for the Fortune 500, but also the Fortune 500,000. And we will continue to build in the open while doing our part to solve the sustainability crisis in Open Source.

Workflows change, issues persist

Well before the days of Git, folks shipped software with punched cards, and there were bugs. Engineers deployed “patches” (literal patches; that’s where we get the phrase) to fix the bugs. The ways developers build software are still changing, and our continued focus on the practitioners (not the buyers) means Sentry will be there to help them ship with confidence. Whether your pair programming partner is Copilot, Cody, Devin, Augment, (or whatever AI-powered solution just hit the front page of Hacker News), you will still need to mitigate bugs, probably even more so than before. Simply put, we aren’t done building, not even close. We will continue to ship innovative solutions to match modern developer workflows, however they evolve.

A small token of our appreciation

It is a privilege to say that we support more than 100,000 organizations on our cloud offering, and one that we don’t take for granted. We are committed to each and every one of our users. The best way we can thank all those who have been a part of the journey is to continue to build for them and obsess over every mundane detail of their evolving workflows. And the second best way to thank them? Free swag! Throughout the rest of the year, we will give away $100,000 in Sentry swag to our community. Head here to see the details.

We’re not quite sure what the particulars of the future will look like, but more than ever, we are confident in the role of the developers leading the way. It’s our privilege to build alongside them, for them, as they ship software that defines the world around us.