An Interview with PubNub Leadership: ‘Our Service Demonstrates Operational Excellence, and Our Product Checks the Boxes for High-Value Realtime Use Cases’

PubNub powers thousands of realtime apps around the world, from innovative
start-ups to globally recognized brands, like Adobe, eBay and Peloton.”

Apps, products, and businesses have grown interactive and immersive. As a result, they’ve grown more data intensive. In a nutshell, there’s an ever-increasing number of users, connecting to more applications, creating and consuming more and more data. This is the Internet-of-Things. It’s chat. It’s the on-demand economy. It’s the future of eCommerce. At its core, it’s connected devices communicating bidirectionally
with one another in realtime.

In light of the foregoing, we’re thrilled to present PubNub.

PubNub operates Data Stream Network, which connects, delivers, and controls the data and logic used to power realtime applications at a global scale for companies in the United States and internationally. The company’s solutions are used by businesses big and small to deliver interactivity in chat and collaboration, data visualization, finance, gaming and VR, healthcare and safety, IoT and smarthome, and retail and marketplaces; transportation, geo, and logistics industries; and video, sports, and entertainment industries.

PubNub was incorporated in 2010 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Todd Greene (CEO), Stephen Blum (CTO), and James Hamilton (VP Operations and Controller) spoke to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Todd Greene: In His Own Words

My brilliant co-founder, Stephen Blum, demonstrated an early version of PubNub to me, and I immediately knew this was going to be a hit. In prior years, I had tried to build a number of online games and apps which all needed realtime experiences, and yet I would always stumble on delivering these products because I didn’t have the right underlying technology to deliver on the vision. I knew that if I took the time to get the tech right, I would never have time to launch the app. And if I hacked together some flimsy realtime tech and if the app ever got real adoption, it would crash. We figured that we weren’t the only one caught in that catch-22 situation. Turns out we were right. Today, fewer and fewer people are trying to build their own realtime tech, they’re too busy launching their own amazing idea, and using PubNub to power it.

Stephen Blum: Getting Off on the Right Foot

PubNubset out to develop a Data Stream Network (DSN) for developers to build realtime apps as easily as building a web page, without worrying about security, reliability, or scalability. The PubNub DSN provides global cloud infrastructure and key building blocks for realtime interactivity and lets developers focus on customer innovation. Today, PubNub powers thousands of realtime apps around the world, from innovative start-ups to globally recognized brands, like Adobe, eBay, Hotstar and Peloton. We handle trillions of realtime transactions per month from over 300 million unique devices. And we offer < 250-millisecond latency around the world, through our 15 global Points of Presence.

James Hamilton: The Key Elements of PubNub’s Success
Global scale– We deliver the same speed and reliability of our service in the U.S. as we do in Japan, Australia, and Africa. Strategically placing our points of presence across the globe makes us a truly global company, serving global applications.

Focus on security and compliance– Mission-critical applications are powered by PubNub. We power smart devices in people’s homes. We power ambulance dispatch services. As a result, we take security incredibly seriously and have built a number of features into our network, and are certified for the most important compliances (GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, Privacy Shield), to keep our customers’ data safe and their apps secure.

Established internal company values– earns customer loyalty, ruthless efficiency, passion for innovation, point positive, and celebrate our achievements. This puts employees here in a positive state of mind and empowers and supports them to do their best work.

Office in the heart of SOMA– We’re right in the center of it all. Not only do we have access to a vast number of technology-focused meetups, conferences, and talks on a weekly basis (something for everyone), our space itself is set up so we can bring meetups here and host others at night.

Stephen Blum: Going Above and Beyond

PubNub has pioneered the Data Stream Network space, delivering a global platform for software companies to use for building applications that have a high dependency on reliable realtime information delivery and processing. Meanwhile, we have seen the market for realtime infrastructure increase exponentially. As the number of connected devices scales to 30 billion by 2020, many fast-growing software markets are becoming increasingly reliant on realtime experiences and, by extension, the reliability of those experiences. These trends are seen in our customers, from Peloton to Atlassian to Swiggy, as well as through trends in the expectations of software in general. PubNub leads from the front, remaining the largest realtime infrastructure provider, and we’re continuing to grow. Our service demonstrates operational excellence, and our product checks the boxes for high-value realtime use cases.

Stephen Blum: PubNub’s Newly Released Products

We just released our new, robust ChatEngine Chat Resource Center. It includes a ton of chat tutorials for web and mobile, design patterns, best practices and more. It’s a great starting point for developers of all levels to build a chat app that will confidently and securely scale as more and more users use it, and integrate features that users will love.

James Hamilton: Key Milestones
PubNub witnessed strong growth in 2018. An expanded executive team helped deliver strong revenue growth, while its global infrastructure expanded to deliver more than 1.3 trillion messages monthly (more than twice the world’s global SMS traffic). Partnerships with the largest cloud, software, and networking providers further grew PubNub’s reach.

PubNub is continuing to expand internationally to meet the growing global demand for its leading realtime Data Stream Network (DSN). With customers in nearly every country and increasing global volume, the global expansion will enable PubNub to more efficiently service its international clients and support the company’s broadening global operations.

To meet the growing demand in Europe, PubNub has opened an office in London, which will house sales, business development, and customer support personnel, serving as a beacon for the U.K. and European customers. In selecting a business location in Europe, PubNub opted for London due to its strong technology base, multi-national talent and recognized strengths in sales development and customer acquisition. In addition to the London office, PubNub has opened an engineering office in Katowice, Poland, where engineering and product teams will focus on delivering the PubNub promise of a highly
reliable and stable global infrastructure at massive scale.

The company recently secured $23 million in Series D funding, adding strategic investor Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to the strong stable of Venture Capital and industry heavyweights backing its mission. With full participation from all existing investors, this new round brings the company’s total funding amount to approximately $70 million.

Leadership | PubNub

Todd Greene, Co-founder/CEO: As an entrepreneur, Todd Greene has founded and successfully sold companies across the software spectrum. He helps shape the PubNub vision of revolutionizing the way people interact online. Mr Todd most recently was CEO of Loyalize, an Audience Participation company successfully sold to Function(x) (FNCX), a Robert F.X. Sillerman company, where he designed the first-ever massively multi-user Social TV mobile and web applications licensed to companies like Viacom and Yahoo. Previously, he was the founder and CTO/VP Products of CascadeWorks, a company providing Services Procurement solutions to Texas Instruments, Charles Schwab, and ABN Amro. After working with companies like GE, SGI, and Quantum while a consultant at Price Waterhouse, Mr Todd joined NetDynamics (sold to Sun Microsystems in 1998) to help create a truly game-changing product: the first application server built for the Internet.

Stephen Blum, Co-founder/CTO: Stephen Blum’s vision and strong technical chops drove the initial architecture of PubNub, building a core engine that has successfully scaled to the some of the largest realtime deployments in the world. He has been a successful software entrepreneur his whole life, starting his first company, LTSun, at age 17, and joining Stephen Blum’s vision and strong technical chops drove the initial architecture of PubNub, building a core engine that has successfully scaled to the some of the largest realtime deployments in the world. He has been a successful software entrepreneur his whole life, starting his first company, LTSun, at age 17, and joining Microsoft after its acquisition. Mr Blum was the chief architect for TrustedOpinion.com, a 50-language social recommendations site that grew to over one million users across over 100 countries.

James Hamilton, VP Operations and Controller

Hailing from the Midwest, James thrives in helping structure companies for growth, bringing over 20 years of diverse financial and operations leadership experience. James began his career early while at UW Madison leading a finance team at Genetics Computer Group (now part of BIOVIA) then working in management consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers. At 1WorldSync he helped scale operations across Europe and South America and at Pacific Maritime Association he improved financial operations across over 40 entities in 32 locations. Outside of work James enjoys working with teenagers, helping them navigate life’s challenges. He spends his weekends hiking the Marin headlands with his wife, dog and 2 kids as well as honoring his Wisconsin roots hanging around the hockey rink.

“We handle trillions of realtime transactions per month from over 300 million unique devices. And we offer < 250-millisecond latency around the world, through our 15 global Points of Presence.”