Hitchcock and Daly started the company in their early 20s. Back then it was a free-open-source project on a singe server in their dorm room. But they almost shut it down when they ran out of money. So they put a “donate” button on their website. That didn’t help much, so they strengthened their plea and told their users if they didn’t get $25,000 in the next week, they would have to shut Dyn down. They ended up getting $40,000. That was the first time Hitchcock and Daly realized that they could turn Dyn into a real, viable business. And that’s exactly what they did. Hitchcock and Daly ran Dyn for 11 years without having to take any VC money. During that time, Dyn grew by leaps and bounds. Today it has more than 3,500 enterprise customers, including big names like Twitter, Netflix, CNBC, and Pfizer. In 2012, Dyn took its first VC funding of $38 million. Daly left Dyn soon after that. In May of 2016, Dyn raised another $50 million in VC funds, valuing the company at $365 million. Hitchcock stepped down soon after, though he retained a seat on the board. Dyn has raised $100 million in VC funds overall. This attack didn’t hurt the acquisition discussions that were already underway with Oracle. On Monday, November 21, Oracle announced that it had purchased Dyn. The price tag was a reported to be just north of $600 million. Oracle plans to integrate Dyn into its cloud computing services.
