A New Partnership: Insight Partners and The New Stack

Global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners has acquired The New Stack, the two companies announced Tuesday. Before I get into the details, I’d like to share a story that may shed some light on how we got here and what the acquisition means for The New Stack’s community and sponsors.

In early 2014, I had a conversation with my dear spouse, Judy. It had only been a few days since I had met with Heather Fitzsimmons of Mindshare PR at Caffe Centro in San Francisco’s South Park. Heather asked: “Would you ever be interested in starting your own blog?” I paused and asked: “Do you have any sponsors?” She said she did. I left Caffe Centro, boarded the BART, and started my business plan on the way back home to Portland.

The initial thinking remains true to our vision: The New Stack is defined by services and software on sophisticated and fast distributed infrastructure. Scale served as our focus on bringing a deeper understanding of the development, deployment, and management of technologies software developers, engineers, and operations professionals required for their increasingly complex work. A few days later we had a sponsor on board with more to follow.

I asked Judy if she could support starting a business. After some pause, she said yes. At the time, we agreed, The New Stack would be a ten-year project. We are now in our eighth year.👁 Image

With Insight’s support, we’ll now be around for years to come with The New Stack, building the culture and our brand with broadened and deeper coverage for our community.

Insight’s team is committed to further building The New Stack, along with the team that has made us who we are today. They are putting a deep focus on the developer community. Our partnership with Insight aligns with their goals and provides The New Stack with the opportunity to be more deeply embedded into the technology ecosystem.

Our sponsors provide the foundation for the needed explanation and analysis of at-scale development, deployment, and management. Their contributions provide their peers with perspectives that provide clarity to often complex, nuanced topics while also serving as a place to build lasting narratives. The effort is an exercise in building trust in their work and respect among their peers.

The New Stack is defined by services and software on sophisticated and fast distributed infrastructure. Our partnership with Insight aligns with their goals and provides The New Stack with the opportunity to be more deeply embedded into the technology ecosystem.

We’ve made investments in our editorial team with last year’s hire of Richard MacManus as senior editor — MacManus founded and built ReadWriteWeb — as well as with Colleen Coll as our digital media operations and marketing manager. Colleen joined us from the Quantitative Imaging Systems (Qi), a biotech startup. And this past month, we also made two more instrumental hires. Heather Joslyn joined us as features editor; She was previously editor-in-chief at Container Solutions, and a senior editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Heather leads our ebook development and other in-depth coverage. She will work with writers to better our feature stories. Last month, we also hired Darryl Taft as news editor. Darryl has more than 20 years of news experience as a technology journalist covering the developer space, most recently at Tech Target.

The New Stack team is in many ways why we are here today. The editorial team will be led by Joab Jackson, managing editor, with considerable help from Michelle Maher, our assistant editor. Libby Clark will be vice president of strategy and Ben Ball will continue to work with sponsors as director of sales and account management.

Joab, Michelle and Ben have worked with us since 2015. Ben joined as our first employee in 2015, after logging time at DZone as publications editor and research analyst. Joab and Michelle joined several months later, both from the IDG News Service, where Michelle worked as a graphics and copy editor and Joab as a staff writer. Libby joined us in 2017, fresh from The Linux Foundation.

Judy, my spouse, partner, and co-founder, deserves the most credit of all. When we started, Judy worked full-time as a nurse. On weekends she managed the books. She was a copy editor, managed accounting, finance and became our star operations chief. Judy is a marvel at her work. She has a new title, now, as general manager of operations.

In conclusion, I’d like to thank the Insight Partners team for being supportive, informative, and thoughtful over the past several months. We’ve come to know the people there who have guided us so well. It’s just fun to work with them. Our colleagues there have shown confidence in us and have built a trust to demonstrate that our partnership will be long-lasting.

The New Stack’s core values center on trust, transparency, thoughtfulness, thoroughness, teamwork, and transformation. Insight Partners share similar values. The company has adopted a pledge that focuses on diversity, inclusivity, and a step further, requiring their portfolio companies to report diversity metrics.

We are together committed to supporting women, people of color, and other underrepresented minorities. In those core beliefs, I am confident our partnership will serve the community that has come to rely on The New Stack with its focus on at-scale technologies. Insight shares our beliefs that by providing deeper explanation and analysis we can help inform communities and maybe even have an impact on this scaled-out, complex world.