This past May marked a pretty special milestone for us — ten years since the first lines of code that would become DatoCMS were committed!
Sure, the company itself isn't quite ten yet — as you can see from my git email at the time — but we weren't about to let that technicality stop us from throwing a little celebration! More importantly, it gave us the perfect reason to do something we'd never done before: get our entire remote team in the same room.
We're a fully remote company. Many of us have only seen each other on the occasional calls and Basecamp threads. Some of us have worked here for years and had never shared a meal in person. So for the 10-year mark, we decided to do something simple: meet, eat, and hang out. Somewhere sunny.
Since we're mostly Italian anyway (save for 2 token non-Italians 🤌), we chose to melt and stuff our faces in the Tuscan countryside.
We also had a no-work no-laptop thing going on, so if you're salty with Roger or Marcelo for delayed support times, I'm the one to blame 🫥
Some of us came from Turin, a couple from around Tuscany, and our token non-Italians from the US and Berlin. It was great to finally see the 3 Matteos together — for all of you who've been as confused as us when you enter a call and hear "Matteo," the math is honestly ridiculous: 13 total team members, 3 of them named Matteo, which gives us a solid 25% Matteo concentration rate.
There were handshakes and hugs, but it didn't take long for the food to come out. We kicked things off with our first lunch together. And since we're in Italy, that meant the full service antipasti > primi > secondi > dolce > caffè > ammazzacaffè stretch:
To wash off the food coma (which would pop up at least twice a day), we loaded into cars and drove into the Tuscan hills — classic rolling-green-wine-country stuff — to a villa where we could shake off the meat sweats by the pool.
How long was dinner? Slow and heavy, as all good dinners should be. What did we do after? Rallied just enough to play a few rounds of Time's Up — you know, the charades game where everyone gets increasingly dramatic.
The next day came with a sliver of activity which is the most mobile we'd be all week (after breakfast, of course), a super fun quad-bike session across the Tuscan hills, through vineyards, up to medieval towns, and down rocky hills.
Of course, ending with another packed lunch. After which came dinner. But this one hit different. We brought out the champagne and cake to celebrate the milestone we've all achieved together thanks to you.
The scorecard? Still here, still small, still independent, still profitable, still doing things our way with no plans to change that.
No speeches, just championing through a slice while we were all fainting from the lasagne earlier.
And finally, to wrap things up the next day, the final day. What came first? Breakfast, of course. What came next? One last road trip to visit a legendary Tuscan butcher an hour away for what can only be described as a four-hour steak marathon.
The damage report: eight courses, each one better than the last, each one stacking up the meat sweats.
And then we were done. There's not much of a moral here. No big takeaway. So what was the point of this post without adding any typical 10-year timeline or life lesson of what's to come and what aspect of content management we're looking to revolutionize with AI?
Nothing really — just taking a few moments to distract ourselves from the daily work we do to spend time getting to know the people behind the avatars, and share the people behind the CMS with you 👇
Ten years is a long time in SaaS. Long enough to have survived wave after wave of hyped frontend frameworks, multiple generations of CMS trends, and then some. The product's changed a lot. The team's changed a bit. The vibe? Still the same — build something good, don't overthink it, have a laugh.
So I'm not pushing some oracle vision of "here's the next 10 years of Dato", but now that we've digested away our gluttony, and appreciated all we've managed to accomplish together, we can get back to focusing on you and continuing to build on the CMS since you are the reason we do what we do.
