A Chat with Mehdi Daoudi, CEO & Founder at Internet Resilience Company: Catchpoint Systems Inc.

If you could describe your journey in one line, what would it be?

 

From Failure to Founder: How a System Failure Led Me to Trailblaze Internet Performance Monitoring.

 

 

Tell us about yourself?

 

I currently serve as CEO of Catchpoint, the Internet Resilience company. I started Catchpoint with my cofounders in 2008, after my experience in IT inspired me to build the digital experience platform I envisioned as a user.

I spent more than ten years at Google and DoubleClick, where I was responsible for quality of services, buying, building, deploying and using internal and external monitoring solutions to keep an eye on the DART infrastructure, which delivers billions of transactions a day. I also hold a BS in international trade, marketing, and business from Institut Superior de Gestion in France.

 

 

What is the best lesson you’ve learnt as an entrepreneur?

 

In 1999, while working at DoubleClick, I inadvertently took down 5,000 ad servers with a simple oversight — deleting a single pixel while cleaning up files. The aftermath—a 3-hour blackout led to breached service level agreements (SLAs), huge financial losses, including a staggering $1.5 million refund to just one client, and even landed DoubleClick on the news. At the time, I felt lucky my boss didn’t fire me.

However, that failure at DoubleClick eventually led me to build Catchpoint. I started Catchpoint to help make the Internet a better place. I now serve as CEO of a company that offers the tech, tools and support that I wished I’d had back then. We’re the Internet Resilience company trusted by 9 out of 10 top digital companies, serving clients like Akamai, SAP, Dell, Google and Microsoft. As entrepreneurs, it’s our job to take a proactive approach to build a better world, even incrementally.

 

Tell us about the company you have built.

 

Catchpoint is driven by a single mission: to proactively identify and resolve issues across the Internet Stack before they impact customers, workforce or digital experiences. Today’s Internet infrastructure is fragile, constantly changing and reliant on the seamless interaction of numerous networks, protocols, agents and systems. When the Internet fails or even buffers, the costs are immense, productivity is lost and reputations are damaged (cough cough CrowdStrike).

In fact, a 2023 Forrester survey reported that 39% of respondents estimated their company lost up to one million dollars due to disruptions in the preceding month. We analyze and flags issues in our customer’s networks before they can become incidents with widespread impact, and we work with some of the biggest brands in the world to ensure excellent digital experience across industries including tech, e-commerce, travel, finance and more.

With product enhancements including the launch of Internet Stack Map and Internet Sonar, as well as quarter over quarter growth in 2024, I look forward to leading our exceptional team onwards to continue to build on this momentum.

 

What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs?

 

As critical as grit and persistence are to building and growing a successful company, just as important is humility and a floorsweeper approach. All of us on the Catchpoint team climb up and down together to do whatever it takes to support each other – and the mission of the companies whose work we help enable. Our core values today reflect the same characteristics we built Catchpoint on: honesty, transparency, and authenticity. I’m a huge believer in radical transparency.

You can build a team with impeccable process, knowledge, know-how and experience. However, if your organization lacks transparency, honesty and integrity, failure is inevitable.