1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Michael Cucchi: In 2008, Marty Kagan, a veteran of Cisco and Akamai, co-founded Cedexis, a company that became a pioneer in observability for Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Cedexis’s flagship product monitored the quality of experience delivered by CDNs to their customers. Among its many capabilities, Cedexis could help CDN customers decide which CDN to run on in which country and make better routing decisions. However, to do this required processing extremely large amounts of real time data.

As Cedexis grew its customer base, they became acutely aware of the cost of data storage: the cost of storing that critical real-time data, grew to be one of Cedexis’ biggest expenses, second only to payroll. This disturbing cost burden weighed heavily on their minds, and was ultimately the birth of Hydrolix.

Marty (CEO) and Hassan Alayli (founding CTO) assembled a team to build the Hydrolix real-time data platform and rid the world of the data impossibilities they’d experienced. Today, Hydrolix is the only platform that can ingest internet and global scale data in real time, and deliver one dashboard with the top performance and security insights in seconds. Because of Hydrolix’s 25-50x compression, long term retention of years versus days is table stakes. The combination is changing how digital businesses are run.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1–2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Michael Cucchi: Hydrolix found real growth by adapting our platform for market gaps. Initially that meant solving a critical customer need for a partner of ours, Akamai. It fit all our differentiators: Global scale, real time sensitive, and limited data for analytics. When we transformed what took them 30 minutes into 5 seconds, it took off across their customer base. As we heard more challenges from their customers and ours we wanted to expand our use cases and highlight Hydrolix’s differentiating capabilities in and outside of our OEM as Akamai’s TrafficPeak. We quickly adapted our solution for AWS, Azure, and GCP clouds and brought our capabilities directly to the enterprise.

Hydrolix is today the standard for monitoring the largest streaming events in the world such as the Super Bowl, Olympics, FIFA Club World Cup, Black Friday sales and others. Hydrolix is the only platform that can deliver real-time analytics that gets customers insights in seconds – across petabytes of globally distributed data at true internet scale. We deliver real-time visibility that has been out of reach, with unique capabilities competitors don’t offer: one-of-a-kind, built-in CDN observability that brings edge-to-enterprise intelligence. We bring faster queries and complete operational intelligence across companies’ entire distributed infrastructure, with insights delivered in seconds on petabyte-scale data.

Our use cases have also expanded. Our platform is now used for observability, security, AI training, and ad tech.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Michael Cucchi: Our partnerships and enabling our partners drive revenue scale for us, specifically content delivery networks and cloud providers. We have found that consistent collaboration, communication and enablement have led to our success. With both we have launched joint campaigns that include social media and ads, ABM email campaigns, analyst relations, public relations, case studies and other joint content, and events. We also have enabled hundreds of sellers and continue to do so regularly.

For our direct channel, we put a lot of focus on ABM, getting a deep understanding of our customer profile, and targeting those that we know have a problem we can solve. These campaigns involve a mix of outbound and inbound marketing, and creating content that is educational, interesting and inspiring. We don’t want to slam customers with a sales pitch. We aim to get a deep understanding of the problems they are trying to solve and then show how we can solve them.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2025 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Michael Cucchi: While SEO will always be relevant, we are seeing a big shift to GEO. Prospects are no longer only using major search engines to find solutions to problems. They are turning to AI for answers and want to be at the forefront of their search. To achieve that, we have expanded our corporate communications and analysts relations programs focusing on earning credibility from those outside our company. We have restructured our brand messaging and website, and we are updating our content library and digital ad strategy.

On the solution side in regard to AI, we have launched Bot Insights. The solution equips businesses with understanding and acting on bot behavior in real time while exploring months or years of historical trends in seconds. The initial release ingests and correlates massive volumes of bot and crawler activity data in seconds, enabling precise classification of bot behaviors and identification of AI bot and agentic AI requests across web properties. With Bot Insights, e-commerce, finance, travel, media and other digital businesses can can get a clear view of how AI and other bot traffic drives revenue loss, increases infrastructure costs, and erodes search acquisition.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Michael Cucchi: To truly scale the first time buyer should buy into the most pure and direct value proposition. For us today that’s bringing globally distributed delivery of applications into view for enterprises. Since delivering that foundation, we’ve rapidly added capabilities for availability, security, bot visibility, and digital operations that can all immediately be delivered on the initial foundation. First time buyers need to immediately feel our impact, trust our products and people, and our platform. From there we can help them solve a broad variety of real time analytics challenges.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Michael Cucchi: Today social media is a much broader surface area. If you are a global company, expand past the obvious and try to reach your users and practitioners where they learn and interact. 80% of the buyer’s journey is digital. Map out that journey and make it seamless, rich, and self led. Only engage with sales led tactics when the time is right, and when you do cut right to the buyer’s use case. GEO > SEO, but ultimately understand how traditional, LLM driven, malicious, and the future agentic bots operate and build a process that updates your ecommerce strategy based on that.