"It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5 am when you've been sleeping in silk pajamas." This quote from boxing champion Marvin Hagler, I feel, perfectly encapsulates the relentless drive needed to sustain excellence in any endeavor. It speaks to Hagler’s vigilance against complacency, an ethos that resonates deeply with us at Nexthink, especially as we celebrate our 20th anniversary and our ongoing status as a Leader in the Forrester Wave.
Building a successful startup is daunting, particularly when you're introducing a new paradigm in IT. Gaining credibility is a twofold challenge: you must prove your reliability while convincing prospects of your mission and vision—often without the initial customer base or endorsements from influencers like Forrester. Surviving and thriving for two decades, while pioneering a category that has genuinely transformed an industry, is an achievement that humbles and excites us.
On a personal note, our early days brought a mix of exhilarating highs and sleepless nights. I often felt like I was learning to play chess blindfolded—struggling to identify key contacts within organizations and understand their interconnections. Every win and new partnership was a significant validation, yet each success was accompanied by countless rejections and near-misses. The key lies in learning from mistakes, honing your ability to articulate your vision, and earning the trust of visionary customers willing to invest in a shared future.
Conservatism vs. Innovation
Riding the wave of early success was an incredible feeling. However, you quickly realize that the sleepless nights don’t end there; maintaining leadership status presents as many challenges as achieving it.
At the core, I believe the secret to sustained success lies in balancing quality service with innovation. On the one hand, you have the critical need to be absolutely reliable for your customers. As your customer base grows and their organizations expand, the consequences of a single misstep become ever more significant. Everything we offer must be dependable and impactful, and ensuring this reliability remains our top priority.
However, being overly cautious can also become a risk, potentially leading to an overly conservative mindset. The moment you stop innovating, you risk failing your customers in a different way. Our obsession has been to ensure that our customers can trust us to always deploy the latest and best technologies, distinguishing true innovation from mere iteration.
This mentality comes with its own set of challenges. New trends, fads, and concerns constantly emerge in our industry. We have been leaders in encouraging IT to be proactive (and now preventative) rather than merely reactive. The same principle applies to us when it comes to innovation: we strive to be predictive, not reactive.
Throughout, we've remained true to what defined Nexthink in our earliest days: our vision for a true observability solution for the digital workplace, one that allows IT to see the experience through the eyes of the employee. We've had to continually ask ourselves: Will this investment contribute to or distract from this ultimate goal? This question hasn't always been easy to answer, and not every decision has been the right one. But taking this question seriously, every time, may have led to more stress and sleepless nights, yet we believe it’s also helped us remain true to what made us successful in the first place.
This month, alongside the honor from Forrester, we received further affirmation that we continue to do things right. The CrowdStrike outage was disastrous for many industries, and we took great pride in knowing that so many of our customers were able to avoid its impact, thanks to the advanced observability solutions we helped them implement. Hearing about IT teams working tirelessly to mitigate damage, and learning about the confidence and efficiency with which our customers responded, was a powerful reminder of the enduring vitality of our guiding vision.
This is precisely why we do what we do, and it remains as much a privilege now as it has been at any point in our last twenty years of business.
