Redgate is a for-profit company. We look to make money by building and selling tools that help you. If we do a good job, we make money. If we don’t, you shouldn’t buy our tools.

I found this value to be very interesting:

The next page has this statement:

Focusing purely on the numbers is a sure way to kill Red Gate’s culture. We believe that if we focus on the game – building awesome products that people want to buy, and then persuading them to buy them – then success will follow.

Profits matter. Certainly all of us want to be paid (and get a bonus of some sort). With the changes in Redgate’s board this year, this is a piece of culture that I believe in and advocate to keep as an item of focus.

We watch profits, but we don’t optimize for profit, we aim to optimize in building better and better products that meet the need of our customers and prove their value from an ROI standpoint. Especially in this era of subscription software.

Our goal is what’s in the quote: build awesome products.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.