In 2014, Highrise was spun off as a separate (but wholly-owned) company from Basecamp. Last year it celebrated its tenth anniversary in business. And this year it’s moving back in with Basecamp.
In some ways, it’s like it never left. While Highrise operated as an independent company under Nathan Kontny as CEO, Basecamp’s technical operations team continued to run servers and systems. Our support team still has a lot of people who used to answer customers when Highrise was a direct part of our suite of products. And almost all the members of the original product team for Highrise are still with Basecamp.
In other ways, this is indeed a change. Nathan Kontny had built a team of seven to lead new development, and they made a lot of improvements over the years. We want to thank the team for all their work and wish them all the very best.
Spinning Highrise off into a separate company with a separate team and CEO was always a bit of an experiment. While that experiment had a bunch of highlights, we ultimate decided it was time to try something different on both the product and business side after a thorough review was conducted some time ago.
For customers of Highrise, we at Basecamp are committed to supporting the product until the end of the internet! Highrise is home to over 10,000 customers who’ve trusted their data and their business to us. We are grateful for the trust and will continue to operate Highrise to the same high standards as Basecamp.
In short, this transition back to the Basecamp team is going to be nearly invisible to Highrise customers. Highrise is returning to the team that originally built the software, and it’s being operated on the technical side by the same team that always did so.
We’ve also begun exploring a range of new directions for the product’s future. We’re not yet ready to share where this is going, but will do so as soon as there’s a final path set.
Thank you to all our Highrise customers whether you’ve been with us for 10 days or 10 years! ❤️
– Jason & David
