Cheers to Robert, Dylan, and the FireHydrant Team
Huge congratulations to Robert Ross (aka “Bobby Tables”), Dylan Nielsen, and the entire FireHydrant team on joining Freshworks!
When we invest at seed, we’re not just underwriting an outcome. We’re underwriting people, conviction, and the willingness to endure the full startup sinusoidal journey. FireHydrant was exactly that, from day one.
I still remember first meeting Robert through Namely’s VP Eng in late 2018. One of those introductions where, within minutes, you can tell you’re talking to someone who deeply understands the problem, not just intellectually, but viscerally. The scars from years as an SRE were already there. The obsession was obvious. We quickly pounced to lead FireHydrant’s Seed round in Dec 2018.
As first time technical founders, they made many common mistakes you’d expect. But we were there each step of the way to coach, guide, and support.
We still laugh about the first board meeting 7 years ago. The deck was rough around the edges, to put it kindly, but the thinking underneath it was razor sharp. The product vision, the customer pain, the clarity around why incident response was fundamentally broken. The ingredients were all there. The potential was undeniable.
A tradition started - unintentionally at first, but very deliberately over time. For every single FireHydrant board meeting over the past seven years, I showed up wearing a FireHydrant sweatshirt or t-shirt. No matter the agenda. No matter the market cycle. No matter how hard the conversation was going to be. It was a small thing, but it symbolized something bigger: belief, alignment, and being all-in alongside the team.
Not long after, Robert gave a dev lunch talk for the Work-Bench community. That was a turning point. You could feel the room light up with founders, operators, and engineers all leaning in. Soon after he co-headlined a NY Enterprise Tech Meetup alongside Alexis Lê-Quôc of Datadog. He didn’t just deliver a product pitch, it was a manifesto. People walked out buzzing, convinced this was a company that had to exist.
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From there, it was a blur of milestones and moments that brought me closer to the entire team: speaking at SKOs, sharing the stage at Firehose events, karaoke nights, meals squeezed between meetings, holiday parties, conference hangs, and so much more.
One of my favorite memories over the years was seeing Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service with Robert. We both share a fondness for emo music and jumped at the opportunity to see this special 20th anniversary show together at MSG after Robert spoke at our Annual LP meeting. It’s a perfect snapshot of how this relationship always blurred the line between work and life in the best way possible.
Of course, it wasn’t all highs. Scaling a company during ZIRP and the fallout afterwards, there came the whiplash that so many teams endured: growth-at-all-costs…and then the market literally turning upside down a week later. Hard decisions followed. A RIF that no founder ever wants to make. Deeply human moments, handled with care and integrity after lots of planning and deliberation. During those moments you can tell a founder’s true colors, and Robert consistently communicated with transparency and empathy with the board.
There was the true bet-the-company moment: going all in on Alerting. A bold call. A scary one given the company’s limited engineering capacity. I’ll never forget the late night Zooms and the lunch conversation right before Robert pulled the trigger. He knew it was the right call and was proven right when competitors started copying the feature and customers started flocking to FireHydrant in droves. That’s how you know you’ve struck a nerve. And then, in the midst of more turbulence, the conviction to buy a competitor, Blameless. Calm, deliberate leadership when it mattered most.
Along the way, we’ve had the privilege of spending real time with so many incredible people:
- Trow, the company’s VP Sales who deftly handled the role of player-coach, closing strategic deals himself while scaling and leveling up his org. I’ll fondly remember our end of quarter recaps over drinks.
- Danielle, building with clarity and strength as CTO while enhancing the company’s enterprise offerings.
- Colin, a FireHydrant OG who was a sales machine during his tenure and always gave me the real talk on deals during our coffee chats in Chicago.
- And Scott, who joined in the earliest days when everything was still fragile and helped secure our first large customers.
These are the moments seed investors actually sign up for.
When we say “we have your back,” we mean it. We’re not here just for the up-and-to-the-right slides. We sign up for the uncertainty, the doubt, the hard calls, and the quiet wins. FireHydrant was the full journey - and then some.
Robert, Dylan, and team: we couldn’t be prouder. You built something real, something durable, something that mattered deeply to customers - and you did it with heart.
We’re so pumped for this next chapter at Freshworks and have no doubt you’re going to make a massive impact.
Cheers to what you built and to everything that’s still ahead. 🍻
