At a startup, every year is transformative. There’s the year you come up with the idea. The year you get funded and quit your day job. The year you launch. Each one of these events moves your company to a new, distinct phase. For Talkdesk, 2015 wasn’t the year we launched, the year we quit our day jobs or the year we got funding, but it was transformative all the same. Looking back, the Talkdesk of January 2015 is unrecognizable compared to the Talkdesk of December 2015.

From our incredible founding at a hackathon in 2011 up to this year, we bootstrapped our company. We paid rent, payroll and servers out of our initial revenue, borrowing office space and sometimes living space, just to get by. In 2015, all that changed.

In late 2014, we received seed funding from Storm Ventures, our office space was tiny in Silicon Valley and shared in Portugal, and our team was comprised of 28 individuals who worked around the clock. We are ending 2015 146 team members strong, with beautiful offices in downtown San Francisco and Lisbon, and DFJ and Salesforce Ventures added to our list of backers.

So what happened this year? To put it simply, we built out a real company. It all started with our team. We attracted like-minded executives and team members who believe in the customer experience above all else. These are the kind of people who are committed to Talkdesk’s original vision of providing customers with the highest quality product and support.

Our new team members see what we saw when we were eating $2 tacos every night while bootstrapping this company: The call center market is a $22B industry filled with legacy players. Ancient call center platforms are slowly dying, leaving room for new, cloud-based platforms like Talkdesk. Call center softwaredoesn’t have to be clunky, complicated and expensive. It can be as simple as Slack, as robust as Salesforce and innovative as Google. Our vision is to build and iterate on a real-time customer interaction platform for both sales and service.

It’s this vision that attracted DFJ, Salesforce Ventures and our other investors. Salesforce, the giant in the cloud industry, was in our shoes just 15 years ago, competing with Old Guard players like Oracle, SAP and Siebel. Like us, they believed that the enterprise software of the future should be easy to deploy, use and modify. Like us, Salesforce patiently won over individual customer after individual customer on their way to becoming the market leader. The support of Salesforce Ventures and our other investors has been invaluable in assisting us in our rapid growth in 2015.

This year represented a turning point in the life of our company. We’ve come a long way from that hackathon. Stay tuned. 2016 promises to be an even bigger year.