Our Next Adventure
As builders, there is nothing more gratifying than crafting a product that is used by millions. That saves them countless hours of effort. That turns something complex and frustrating into something accessible, intuitive, even delightful.
As founders, there is nothing more fulfilling than assembling a team of brilliant, passionate, customer-obsessed, kind people who you love working with every day. Who you trust deeply. Who you care for as friends and family.
When we set off to create Crashlytics in 2011, we were struck both by the potential of the nascent mobile ecosystem and by the frustration of actually building for it. How could it be so hard to make an app that didn’t crash? How could the bugs be so tricky to track down and fix, once the app did? We felt there was an opportunity to apply consumer-grade design and engineering to an obscure developer issue; an opportunity to bring enterprise-grade tooling to everyone on earth who aspired to write an app.
We got lucky.
We found a dream-team of like-minded builders who we owe everything to.
And we discovered that we had struck a chord with mobile developers around the world, from established tech companies in Silicon Valley to passionate indie devs in homes, in coffee houses, and in garages in almost every country on Earth.
And the scale left us humbled—today, Crashlytics processes trillions of events, from billions of mobile devices, across millions of apps. Every single month. Today, Crashlytics runs on substantially every active smartphone on Earth.
But that journey wasn’t all smooth.
Building a business is an endless rollercoaster of emotions, of challenges, of long explorations, of setbacks, of celebrations. And we unwittingly found our next project along the way.
The Next Puzzle
As builders, there is nothing more exciting than cracking the next engineering puzzle; than perfecting the next design; than delivering the next capability to customers.
And there is nothing more mind-numbing than the paperwork, and spreadsheets, and financial reports, and inscrutable transaction records that are all required to actually operate the business.
Globally, most entrepreneurs today have no formal training in business finance. We certainly didn’t. Today, you start a company to solve a real problem for real people, or to offer a service you’re skilled at, or to provide a living for you and your family. You don’t start a company because you want to operate a business—but you have to anyway.
Human-Centered Design
Software has unlocked vast capabilities in some areas—you no longer must be a dedicated filmmaker to create a movie, or a professional travel agent to book a plane ticket—but it has stumbled in others. You still must be a trained accountant to understand your company’s financials, and even then they require tedious, manual work to keep updated.
We’ve become obsessed with solving this, but in the right way. Not with bots that replace human accountants, but with software experiences that pair design and machine learning to democratize financial savvy. That empower people of all backgrounds and skillsets to visualize, understand, and manage their businesses, and elevate their interactions with their accountants, investors, and advisors.
We feel there is an opportunity to apply consumer-grade design and engineering to the arcane world of business accounting; an opportunity to bring enterprise-grade tooling to everyone on Earth who aspires to own or operate a business.
From Digits, With Love
We’ve been lucky to reassemble a bit of the core team we loved so much to go build this together, along with some incredible new additions.
From the team that brought you Crashlytics, we hope you’ll wish us luck on this Digits adventure.
We’ll have more to share soon,
