Twelve years ago, CatalytIQ was born.
It started out as being a very technology focused company with just myself and my first collaborator, Ryan Tracey (ex Thawte), helping clients with open-source tools and products. My personal favourite was building an online chess gaming database and I remember Ryan and I sweating over a pair of home built Linux servers, struggling to cram every game of chess ever played into a MySQL database. Those boxes ran round-the clock, flat-out and I vividly remember the relief when we passed through the billion row mark with a pretty tricked-out database setup and some fearsome perl code in the engine room. Who says you can’t have fun in your work?

Recently, I was reading an article which talked about the failure rate of new companies and it made for pretty sobering reading – new companies lasting 10 years are only 4% of those that start out. Yes – only 4% survive that long historically. So I guess we’re a bit of a rarity – if only statistically! But that’s one of the reasons why I am very passionate about helping new start-ups to make it through all of the hurdles they have to face and I’m very proud to be able to offer advice when other consulting companies keep their distance.

So here’s to the next 12 years of adventure, the future beckons and we’re proud to be a part of it!

Andy Baxter