Podio, we have lift off.

Wow, it’s a great feeling to launch your product to the world after years of hard work. A couple of words spring to mind: gratitude and accomplishment. Podio has grown out of a basement in the Vesterbro district of wonderful Copenhagen, Denmark to become talk of the town in San Francisco.

Back in the basement in Copenhagen,  the four of us worked hard to conceive, develop and market what you know now as Podio. We think the way people work today is broken. We wanted to break the top down command and control structures that characterise enterprise work tools and make them inefficient in the modern workplace. Our goal was to build a platform for work that would encourage bottom up collaboration, communication and process facilitation. We designed the app builder to let you, the end user, regain the power to manage your workflows.

The feedback from early users has been amazing. For the first time, they have felt empowered to build their own tools for work. We wanted to deliver an experience of the same quality that you get from the services you use in the consumer market. We’ve built Podio with this in mind, always.

Of course we didn’t achieve all of this by hiding in a basement in Copenhagen. From the beginning we have been fortunate to have an entourage of innovative people around the company. We’ve worked with people who believed in our vision and helped keep our momentum going: from the visionary Thomas Madsen-Mygdal who did an early seed investment in Podio, to energetic Tommy Ahlers who joined as CEO and angel investor, to the recent A-round investment from the smart people at Sunstone Capital. We have been thrilled to see a number of bright and dedicated people from all over the world join the Podio team, giving their all to make this happen today in San Francisco. Podio will be available globally to anyone who wants to be empowered to work smarter.

From the very start it has been important to be close to our users. Thousands of organisations picked Podio for their work processes while we were in beta, and thousands of people have been using Podio on a daily basis providing valuable feedback. I want to thank the more than 800 people who have attended our workshops in the past year. It has been a real pleasure to meet you in person and see you build your own apps while talking to you about the way you want to work.

Today we launch with confidence. We know where we are headed. We have the right team a unique product and we are looking forward to continuing the journey with you, the users of Podio.