Digital Ocean S1 (think it has bleak future)

S1s · Investing · Source

Mission

Simplify cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time creating software that changes the world

Key Numbers

ARR

$357M (Dec 2020)

Fairly steady growth

TAM

$116B

EBITDA Margin (Adj)

30% (as of Q4)

Letter from CEO

Introduction

Thank you for your interest in DigitalOcean and for considering an investment in our company. I wanted to share a few thoughts with you to provide a little more color on our company.

Our Start and Mission

Nine years ago, our founders had a vision that the cloud was the new way to build modern day web applications. They firmly believed that software developers, entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) were being poorly served by the emerging cloud computing providers. As a result, millions and millions of innovators were not able to take full advantage of the many opportunities becoming available through innovative cloud infrastructure technologies.

DigitalOcean was founded with a focus on creating simple solutions that developers love. Our mission is to simplify cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time creating software that changes the world. We estimate there are approximately 100 million SMBs globally today and 14 million new businesses started each year across the globe. We believe DigitalOcean is the perfect place for them to start, get lift-off and build their businesses.

When start-ups and SMBs are building their applications or businesses, they need to maximize their energies on developing great products and building customer relationships. When they buy technology tools, they want them to be easy to use and they want help and support when they have issues deploying those tools.

DigitalOcean is purpose-built to enable developers, entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMBs in a way that wasn’t possible a decade ago. Our offerings provide on-demand infrastructure and platform tools for developers, start-ups and SMBs that are easy to leverage, broadly accessible, reliable and affordable.

We provide a range of capabilities to access our compute, network and storage infrastructure, as well as software-managed services that provide additional capabilities for managing more robust infrastructure needs - from testing code to building their customer serving applications.

We have removed the barriers to entry for early-stage businesses, helping them turn their ideas into an application, website or tool that is available globally in a matter of minutes - and, importantly, at a manageable and transparent price point.

Our founders started with four key principles that endure today. These four principles allow us to provide a highly differentiated experience for our customers all over the world:

• Simplicity: We take infrastructure technology and make it simple across all aspects of the product experience
• Customer Support: We provide live support to all customers, regardless of price point, and we provide free access on our site to tens of thousands of helpful documents.
• Community: We invest heavily in the community of developers and entrepreneurs by helping them in the early stages of idea generation, and by providing various resources to guide them in successfully pursuing their ventures.
• Open Source Software: Through open source software we enable faster, lower-cost innovation without locking customers into a proprietary software technology stack.

It has been only nine years since DigitalOcean was founded and we are incredibly proud of what we have already accomplished. We now serve more than 570,000 customers in over 185 countries. We’ve built a secure, efficient, reliable and global-scale infrastructure with a growing set of managed software services to support our customers. We’ve established ourselves as a top developer learning community with over 34,000 developer tutorials, technical guides and community-generated Q&As. We have also crossed $357 million in ARR and achieved 30% Adjusted EBITDA margin in 2020.

And we’re just getting started...

Strategy

Our strategy is focused on three key imperatives - Grow faster, Grow smarter and Grow together.

To Grow faster, we are focusing on optimizing our go-to-market execution - from how we attract customers to how we expand our customer relationships to what we offer our customers. We are committed to innovation in the products and services we offer and will always be laser-focused on serving our core customer set. We have a massive customer and revenue opportunity in front of us and this go-to-market innovation will drive our growth and long-term success.

To Grow smarter, we are focusing our team on building efficiency as we scale. We will continue to improve our customers’ experience on our platform, which will include building more robustness, security, reliability and scalability to allow them to grow with us. We will do so while also building operating efficiencies as we invest, so that we can improve operating margins and cash generation over time. Profitability is a choice, and we choose to self-fund our future. This provides our customers with the comfort to put their trust in us and to know we will be here to support their growth and aspirations over the long term. This also provides our investors with confidence that we will prioritize our investments on the highest growth and return-generating activities to create sustainable equity value.

To Grow together, we invest in everyone at DigitalOcean. Even as our business scales, it will continue to be an incredible place to work and to grow personally and professionally. We want this to be a memorable and defining experience for each of us in the broader arc of our careers. We want to support everyone across our company, so each of us is ready to perform at our best as we march together and build an enduring company that serves significantly more customers, is significantly larger in terms of revenue and is also more profitable.

We look forward to providing regular updates against these key imperatives as we make progress over time.

Prospectus Overview

Our mission is to simplify cloud computing so that developers and businesses can spend more time building software that changes the world.

DigitalOcean is a leading cloud computing platform offering on-demand infrastructure and platform tools for developers, start-ups and small and medium-sized businesses, or SMBs. We were founded with the guiding principle that the transformative benefits of the cloud should be easy to leverage, broadly accessible, reliable and affordable. Our platform simplifies cloud computing, enabling our customers to rapidly accelerate innovation and increase their productivity and agility. Over 570,000 individual and business customers currently use our platform to build, deploy and scale software applications. Our users include software engineers, researchers, data scientists, system administrators, students and hobbyists. Our customers use our platform across numerous industry verticals and for a wide range of use cases, such as web and mobile applications, website hosting, e-commerce, media and gaming, personal web projects, and managed services, among many others. We believe that our focus on simplicity, community, open source and customer support are the four key differentiators of our business, driving a broad range of customers around the world to build their applications on our platform.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing how companies across the globe develop and deploy applications. The cloud offers lower upfront cost and superior flexibility, extensibility and scalability as compared to on-premise software development environments. These benefits are especially valuable for start-ups and SMBs, as they typically have more limited financial resources, operational expertise and IT personnel. As software and cloud-based technologies have become essential across industries and businesses of all sizes, the number of software developers and their strategic importance to organizations are both increasing significantly. According to SlashData, the number of developers globally was 19 million in 2019 and is expected to grow to 45 million by 2030.

Improving the developer experience and increasing developer productivity are core to our mission. Our developer cloud platform was designed with simplicity in mind to ensure that software developers can spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time turning their ideas into innovative applications to grow their businesses. Simplicity guides how we design and enhance our easy-to-use-interface, the core capabilities we offer our customers and our approach to predictable and transparent pricing for our solutions. We offer mission-critical infrastructure solutions across compute, storage and networking, and we also enable developers to extend the native capabilities of our cloud with fully managed application, container and database offerings. In just minutes, developers can set up thousands of virtual machines, secure their projects, enable performance monitoring and scale up and down as needed. Our pricing is consumption-based and billed monthly in arrears, making it easy for our customers to track usage on an ongoing basis and optimize their deployments.

The global developer and open source communities are fundamental to our business, and a key source of ideas and innovations that support our sustained growth. Our developer-centric approach has helped us foster a large and loyal following. We attract approximately 5 million monthly unique visitors to our websites, host what we believe is the largest hackathon in the world, and offer a comprehensive library of high-quality technical tutorials and community-generated questions and answers. Developers and SMBs especially value open source technology as it allows them greater choice, affordability and flexibility, and our platform is designed to take advantage of open source technology to provide our customers with a much more efficient way to work. Our participation in and support of the open source community further enhance the attractiveness, depth and scalability of our offering.

Our customers depend on us for their critical business needs, and we are passionate about providing superior 24x7 customer support to all of our customers, regardless of size. We believe our customer support, coupled with our easy-to-use self-help resources and active developer community, has created tremendous brand loyalty amongst our growing customer base. Our customers become great advocates for DigitalOcean and are a common source of new customer referrals. We are proud of our Net Promoter Score, or NPS, which averaged 65 during 2020, comparable to some of the world’s most beloved brands.

We have a highly efficient self-service customer acquisition model, which we have recently complemented with a targeted inside sales force. Our sales and marketing expense as a percentage of revenue was approximately 14%, 12% and 11% in 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively. The efficiency of our go-to-market model and our focus on the needs of the individual and SMB market have helped us build a global customer base that continues to grow. We had approximately 573,000 customers as of December 31, 2020, up from approximately 502,000 as of December 31, 2018. Our customers are spread across over 185 countries, and around two-thirds of our revenue has historically come from customers located outside the United States. We have a growing number of customers with higher spending levels, and our existing customers are continuing to expand their business with us. Our average revenue per customer (which we refer to as ARPU) has increased significantly, from $35.97 in 2018 to $40.16 in 2019 to $47.78 in 2020. See the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Key Business Metrics” for additional information.

We have experienced strong revenue growth and improving margins in recent periods. For the years ended December 31, 2018, 2019 and 2020, our revenue was $203.1 million, $254.8 million and $318.4 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 25% in 2019 and 2020. Our net loss attributable to common stockholders was $36.0 million, $40.4 million and $43.6 million for the years ended December 31, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively. Our adjusted EBITDA was $39.5 million, $55.2 million and $95.9 million for the years ended December 31, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively. Our net cash provided by operating activities was $38.0 million, $39.9 million and $58.1 million for the years ended December 31, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively. See the section titled “Selected Consolidated Financial Data—Non-GAAP Financial Measures” for additional information regarding adjusted EBITDA, the limitations of this non-GAAP financial measure and a reconciliation of this measure to the most directly comparable financial measure stated in accordance with GAAP.

Industry Background

There are a number of key technology and industry trends driving our opportunity, including:

1. The Growing Need for Technological Innovation is Driving Cloud Computing Adoption. Technology is transforming how businesses of all sizes engage with customers, manage their operations and drive competitive advantages. The global phenomenon of technology-powered growth and innovation requires nearly every company to focus their efforts on harnessing the power of technology through cloud services. Cloud computing has become the new standard for IT infrastructure as organizations seek to benefit from the flexibility, scalability and reliability of the cloud. Cloud technologies enable businesses to better focus their efforts on customer applications rather than the physical infrastructure required to support their operations. Start-ups and SMBs are particularly focused on leveraging the cloud for capabilities that would otherwise be inaccessible due to the high cost and expertise needed to deploy these capabilities on-premise.
2. Proliferation of Cloud Native Start-Ups and SMBs. There are more than 32 million SMBs in the United States alone, according to the World Bank, and we estimate there are at least three times that number, or 100 million SMBs, globally. We expect this number will continue to grow, with more than 14 million net new SMBs created globally each year. In addition, the founding teams of these SMBs are no longer comprised only of technical individuals with advanced software development capabilities, but now include a far wider range of individuals. These individuals are able to leverage simple and reliable development tools and the widespread availability and significantly lower upfront cost of cloud computing to start companies. As such, a significant proportion of start-ups and SMBs are being built in the cloud to benefit from the faster, cheaper and easier way to deploy and manage their business solutions
3. Software Developers Are Increasingly Influential Within Organizations. Companies increasingly rely on developers to quickly adapt to changing technological and business trends in order to compete. This trend has contributed to the shift to the cloud as cloud-based technologies increase the efficiency and flexibility of those developers. Developer productivity has become a top priority for companies around the world as they recognize the significant benefits derived from providing developers with the most powerful tools available. As a result, the global developer population, which according to SlashData will reach 45 million by 2030, has become increasingly influential on technology-related investment decisions.
4. Open Source Software Is Accelerating Innovation. Open source technologies are powering many of the world’s most innovative start-ups and SMBs. This trend is expansive and being driven primarily by developers who are increasingly empowered to use the most efficient tools to accelerate the pace of innovation. Open source software enables individuals and businesses to access and use low cost, proven software tools for their applications instead of investing the time and resources in recreating the same use cases in self-developed software. Businesses of all sizes benefit from the many advantages of open source including, lower costs, increased speed to market, application reliability and flexibility and improved security.
5. Organizations are Increasingly Using Multiple Clouds. Multi-cloud deployments have become increasingly common as individuals and businesses seek to match their applications with the best technology stacks and commercial models to run them while avoiding vendor lock-in akin to legacy IT infrastructure services. The future growth of the cloud-computing market across the globe will benefit significantly from this expanding trend of multi-cloud adoption.

Limitations of Existing Offerings on Developers, Start-Ups and SMBs

Existing offerings from large public cloud vendors are designed for complex, enterprise use cases such as migrating legacy workloads from on-premise to the cloud. The products and services offered by these vendors are not tailored for the needs of individual developers, start-ups or SMBs. The limitations of these enterprise-focused offerings include the following:

• Difficult to Use. Enterprise-focused vendors frequently have complicated implementation processes, which require a significant amount of time to learn complex user interfaces and features rather than allowing developers to focus on building and deploying applications. These unintuitive or inconveniently packaged services have limited the ability of start-ups and SMBs, who typically do not have IT departments or large teams, to maximize the value of their cloud investments due to the amount of time and resources required to train on and manage underlying infrastructure.
• Uncurated set of offerings. Traditional public cloud vendors have built their platforms to serve global enterprises with large development teams. The thousands of ancillary products and services that are offered by these vendors create a significant amount of complexity that is difficult for developers, start-ups, and SMBs to manage.
• Complex and Opaque Pricing. Existing cloud providers often have intricate and unpredictable pricing and billing practices. The lack of pricing transparency frequently leads to surprise charges and higher than expected costs, making budgeting and cost optimization very difficult. Companies frequently need dedicated employees, pricing analytics tools or even specialized consultants to understand how products are priced and how to manage their bills.
• Lack of Customer Support. As traditional public cloud vendors target large enterprise customers, smaller buyers often do not get the necessary level of support required to manage their infrastructure. These smaller buyers, including start-ups and SMBs, are often those most in need of and reliant on support to help them manage their infrastructure effectively and efficiently.

Solution

DigitalOcean was founded with the guiding principle that the transformative benefits of the cloud should be easy to leverage, broadly accessible, reliable and affordable. We pioneered the developer cloud platform to simplify cloud computing, enabling developers and developer teams to quickly deploy and scale applications, collaborate efficiently and improve business performance. Empowered by an easy-to-use self-service model, intuitive control panel and highly predictable pricing, our customers are able to rapidly accelerate innovation and increase their productivity and agility.

• Simple and Intuitive. Our platform is engineered to take a user from inquiry to deployment within minutes, without any specialized training or heavy implementation. We abstract away the complexity that is generally found across legacy cloud providers to provide a compelling, intuitive interface with click-and-go options. Our platform provides users with a deployment interface that is comparable to interfaces provided by consumer internet leaders and is designed to minimize the number of steps to deployment.
• Designed by Developers for Developers. Our platform was built with a developer-first mentality and is designed for a wide range of use cases, such as web and mobile applications, website hosting, e-commerce, media and gaming, personal web projects, and managed services, among many others. Our innovative cloud platform is designed to eliminate the complexity and obstacles associated with deploying in and managing the cloud.
• Built to Help Businesses Scale. Our highly-curated set of solutions, including compute, storage and networking offerings, managed databases and developer and management tools, are all designed to address the needs of start-ups and SMBs as they scale their businesses and require more cloud capabilities.
• Open Source. Our participation in and support of the open source software community enhances the attractiveness, depth and scalability of our offering. It increases the transparency of our technology and allows our customers to more efficiently write their own integrations. We give back to the community by sponsoring projects to create content and tools that help developers build great software and hosting events that are focused on driving the growth of open source, such as our Hacktoberfest, which we believe is the largest hackathon in the world.
• Differentiated Customer Support. We offer expert 24x7 technical support and customer service, with support staff spanning various time zones to ensure our customers quickly achieve their objectives and overcome challenges. Developers and engineers are a key part of our customer support team, and our technical support is—and always has been—available free of charge to all customers. Customers cite our attentive support as a key driver of their decision to start and grow their businesses on our platform.
• Broad-Based Community Ecosystem: We have built one of the world’s largest developer learning communities, with approximately 6,000 high-quality developer tutorials and over 28,000 community-generated questions & answers. The strength and continued growth of our community ecosystem, which is managed by our internal developer relations and editorial teams, is predicated on differentiated content on our community education website, which attracts approximately 3.5 million monthly unique visitors.
• Transparent and Predictable Pricing. Our approach to billing and pricing is simple, intuitive and transparent. Our pricing is consumption-based and renewable monthly, making it easy for our customers to optimize their deployments. We provide detailed monthly invoices, irrespective of the customer’s size or number of products purchased, making it easy to track usage on an ongoing basis. We enable our customers to completely control their spending and ensure there are no hidden charges that appear at the end of the month.
• Security and Data Protection. We invest significantly in securing the computing infrastructure foundation upon which our customers build and scale their projects. We remove the complexity of securing infrastructure for our customers and make it simple for them to build the security layers required for their use cases. We are also committed to customer data privacy and utilize best-in-class access, encryption and data protection technologies and processes.
• Built for Collaboration. Our platform enables secure and efficient collaboration across developer teams to manage and scale infrastructure and applications. We support thousands of developer teams on our platform and provide them with easy-to-use tools to better manage their workflows.

Market Opportunity

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) markets are two of the largest and fastest growing markets across all industries. According to IDC, the worldwide IaaS and PaaS markets for individuals and companies with less than 500 employees are estimated to be approximately $44.4 billion in the aggregate in 2020. The 2020 IaaS market, which is comprised of compute and storage, was estimated to be $31.9 billion. The 2020 PaaS market, which includes database management systems, application platforms and other platform services, was estimated to be $12.5 billion. According to IDC, these combined IaaS and PaaS markets are expected to grow to $115.5 billion in 2024, representing a 27% compound annual growth rate.

We believe the individual developer, start-up and SMB markets are underserved, and we expect our massive addressable market to continue to grow rapidly beyond 2024. The key drivers of this growth come from the increasing technological innovation which drives cloud adoption combined with the growing number of developers and SMBs worldwide. According to SlashData, the global developer population is expected to more than double over the next 10 years to approximately 45 million by 2030. Furthermore, there are more than 32 million SMBs in the United States alone, according to the World Bank, and we estimate that there are at least three times that number, or 100 million SMBs, globally. We expect this number will continue to grow, with more than 14 million net new SMBs created globally each year.

Growth Strategies

• Growing Our Customer Base. We believe there is a substantial opportunity to further expand our customer base. We have historically attracted customers by offering a low-friction, self-service cloud platform combined with a highly-efficient self-service marketing model.
• Increasing Usage by Our Existing Customers. Our customer base of more than 570,000 customers represents a significant opportunity for further sales expansion through increased usage of our platform and adoption of additional product offerings.
• Investing in Our Platform and Product Offerings. We have a history of, and will continue to invest significantly in, delivering innovative products, features and functionality targeted at our core customer base. We have successfully attracted new customers to our platform and driven expansion with existing customers through new product launches, such as our Managed Kubernetes offering in late 2018, our Managed Database offering in 2019 and our App Platform service in October 2020.
• Augmenting Our Platform through Opportunistic Strategic Acquisitions. We believe that strategic partnerships and acquisitions will allow us to accelerate our key platform, product and marketing initiatives. For example, our App Platform service originated from an acquisition and we have expanded our community tutorial content through two small acquisitions, and we believe that additional acquisition opportunities will supplement our organic growth strategy.
• Growing and Engaging Our Community. More than 5 million unique visitors interact with our websites, including our developer community, each month to learn, share and educate others. We are committed to supporting and expanding this community of innovators and technologists through high-quality content and expanded developer-focused programs and events around the world.

Risk Factors unique to DigitalOcean

None - fairly banal

Financials

Digital Ocean Income Statement

Digging Deeper

• 570,000 individual and business customers
• Pricing is consumption-based and billed monthly in arrears
• Have historically generated almost all revenue from self-service and likely to continue being so

Customer Data

• We had approximately 573,000 customers as of December 31, 2020, up from approximately 502,000 as of December 31, 2018
• Two-thirds of our revenue has historically come from customers located outside the United States
• In 2020:
  • 38% of our revenue was generated from North America
  • 30% from Europe
  • 22% from Asia
  • 10% from the rest of the world
• ARPU has increased from $35.97 in 2018 to $40.16 in 2019 to $47.78 in 2020. Defined as the weighted average monthly ARPU over such three or 12-month period
• Top 25 customers made up 11%, 10% and 9% of our revenue in 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively
• Our ARR increased 25%, from $285 million as of December 31, 2019 to $357 million as of December 31, 2020

Untitled Database

** includes approximately 3% from re-engaged customers in each of 2018, 2019 and 2020.*

Product and Platform Offerings

Core Products (Compute)

Droplets (Virtual Machines) and Dedicated Droplets

Offer basic Droplets and Dedicated Droplets, such as general purpose, CPU-optimized, memory-optimized or storage-optimized configurations. Droplet offerings continue to represent a significant majority of our revenue.

Managed Kubernetes and Container Registry

In late 2018, launched use Managed Kubernetes. Customers can start at $10/month. Our Managed Container Registry offering lets customers easily store and manage private container images for rapid deployment to our Managed Kubernetes service. The continued popularity of cloud-native development and the Kubernetes ecosystem has made our Managed Kubernetes service one of our fastest-growing products.

App Platform

App Platform, launched in October 2020, is a PaaS offering that allows customers to build, deploy and scale applications quickly using a simple, fully-managed solution. We handle the infrastructure, application runtimes and dependencies so that developers can push code to production in just a few clicks, enabling them to deliver applications to market faster.

Believe that the launch of App Platform will allow us to expand into new markets such as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Container-as-a-Service (CaaS).

Storage Offerings

Our storage solutions allow our customers to store and quickly access any amount of data reliably in the cloud. We offer several kinds of storage offerings, depending on the customer’s needs, including:

Spaces (Object Storage)

Object storage with a built-in content delivery network (CDN) makes scaling easy, reliable and affordable

Volumes (Block Storage)

Block storage product allows customers to add more storage space and mix and match compute and storage to suit their database, file storage, application, service, mobile and backup needs. This provides supplemental storage beyond the local solid-state drive (SSD) offered with our compute offerings

Backups

Our Backups offering allows weekly system-level backups, providing our customers with the ability to revert to an older state or create new Droplets.

Network Offerings

Provide a generous amount of bandwidth with each successive Droplet purchase. This bandwidth is pooled for the customer’s account and shared by all applications or resources running in their account. Key networking product offerings include:

• Cloud Firewalls
• Managed Load Balancers
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Managed Databases

In 2019, launched Managed Database solution which provides a fully-managed database

• Relational databases (SQL) – PostgreSQL & MySQL
• In-memory key-value data structure stores — Redis

Plan to offer additional database engines starting in 2021.

Developer Experience

Provide rich content resources

Focused on optimizing cloud usage, a powerful and easy-to-use interface, and a variety of technology tools. This enables our customers to get started on DigitalOcean very quickly and easily and seamlessly expand their usage of our products and services as their needs evolve and scale

We believe this focus on helping our customers onboard and better utilize our products and services builds brand loyalty and generates referrals by customers

Our community education website contains thousands of detailed, high-quality technical tutorials written, edited and/or updated by our editorial team. These tutorials cover a wide range of topics relevant to developers, including programming how-tos for specific technical hurdles and guidance on the latest techniques to secure their computing environment

Easy to use UI

We are very proud of our easy-to-use user interface, which enables customers to be up and running in the cloud in as little as three clicks and in less than a minute

Utilize intuitive application programming interfaces (APIs), command line interface (CLI) and plugins/integrations which automate interactions with our cloud platform. This allows customers to use popular tools like terraform to automate infrastructure as code to provision and manage their DigitalOcean deployments. All DigitalOcean products come with detailed product and technical documentation to help our customers deploy to our cloud platform more quickly

Management and collaboration tools

We provide management and collaboration tools to enable our customers to monitor and manage both their software and their team. We currently offer these tools free of charge to our customers as it drives brand loyalty and customer retention across our customer base. Our management and collaboration products include:

• Insights for monitoring
• Projects
• Teams

Community

Focus heavily on building a large highly engaged community that can connect and educate developers across the globe. Developer community enables students, hobbyists and experienced developers alike the tools to learn new skills and technologies and create and deliver new applications.

Foster community through numerous initiatives [like what], and believe these initiatives drive brand loyalty amongst a fast-growing developer community. We also believe that our focus on community engagement spurs our community followers to become advocates for us and our platform

Our community efforts are focused on educating, engaging and connecting the global developer and entrepreneurial communities, and can be grouped into three key categories:

• Education: We operate a community education website which has grown significantly over the past few years, and attracts approximately 3.5 million monthly unique visitors. Offer approximately 6,000 high-quality technical tutorials and a forum with more than 28,000 questions and answers that guide developers in creating and delivering modern applications—not just focused on DigitalOcean products and services, but relevant to any cloud service

Our approach of giving back to the community “more than you receive” helps drive strong brand loyalty for DigitalOcean across the global developer community

• Events & Sponsorships: We support community learning, networking and interaction via targeted industry and customer events, as well as well as technical talks, regional events (which we call Tide conferences) and a virtual 24-hour conference (which we call Deploy). We have hosted Tide conferences in the U.S, India and Europe over the past several years and our first Deploy conference was held virtually in November 2020

In addition to these events, we honor and strengthen our commitment to the open source community via sponsorships that empower aspiring and evolving developers. Each year we host Hacktoberfest, which we believe is the largest hackathon in the world, with approximately 170,000 developers participating in 2020. We distribute our regular Currents market surveys to anyone who seeks market research trends about cloud and open source developments, whether they are a DigitalOcean customer or not

• Start-up Enablement: We also support entrepreneurs and start-ups more directly as they begin their journey. We operate the “Hatch by DigitalOcean” program, which furnishes high-potential start-ups with a robust set of benefits to help them succeed. We partner with some of the most prominent start-up incubators in the world and also accept direct applications to the Hatch program. The benefits we provide our Hatch companies include free infrastructure products and services, free technical support, and membership in our Hatch community that allows founders to collaborate and share learnings. Many of our Hatch participants graduate from the program and become loyal DigitalOcean customers.