We’ve already shared this news with our communities which is that San Francisco’s SAY Media has acquired our company, Dogster, Inc. and our whole team will be joining SAY tomorrow. To understand what this means for our community and members please read those first.

In this post I wanted to share how we, as a team at DogCatsterHQ, feel about this, which, in a word, is thrilled. Say Media is becoming exactly what a modern media company will be in the digital age. They know the future of media is entirely based upon authentic voices, passionate, engaged audiences, and meaningful brand integration. Dogster, Inc. has been reinventing publishing, community, and brand experience since the day we launched so joining Say could not be a more natural fit for our sites and our team.

Matt Sanchez, CEO of Say Media and I captured on video why this is such a natural coming together.

Here’s another video from Say’s website that explains how they envision what a truly Internet-enabled media company should do:

We at DogCatster HQ love what we do and we love having had the independence to build our sites and business such that they best reflect our customers’ desires. We never expected we would find an equally-minded independent company to join forces with, so it’s a joy being able to bring all the resources of an incredibly successful company to what we do.

To all our Dogster and Catster friends and furmily this sure has been a long time coming. Dogster.com launched in January, 2004 before the term ‘social networking site’ was even used. Digital cameras were hardly mainstream then and most Americans had never set up a ‘profile page’, shared a photo on the Internet or had a friend they met online. Yet Dogster hit 100,000 members in a matter of months. We built our own messaging, forums, and group platforms (because on the web, one size definitely does not fit all.) The company operated in the black before we welcomed outside investors. We grew rapidly yet were able to get back to profitability quickly.

We thrived through the downs of 2009 and released entirely reformatted sites in 2010 that are now welcoming a record 2 million monthly uniques. Permit us an industry moment here: We cared profoundly about our members and visitors before empathy became a business strategy; we were lean before it was a religion; we pivoted back when it was called failing and trying something else; we approved each advertiser one by one when bulk ads were still the norm; and through it all had a seriously fun time doing it. We’re not the only ones to have done it this way, but we kept our sanity, marriages and ethics intact and it’s been the ride of a lifetime.

It is also very important that we say thank you. First, thank you to our amazing, diverse, pawsome communities (who we look forward to serving better thanks to our new pawrents). Then we have to thank our amazing team whose average company tenureship is 4.5 years: Paul Thrasher, Yuko Takahasi, Moss Gross, Janine Kahn, Lori Malm, John D. Williams, Kevin Donato and Lissette Hernandez. We would like to thank all our investors including long-term board member Michael Parekh, Jeff Clavier who led our Angel round and has been with us ever since, and the proactive and resourceful Jeremy Liew, Michael Jones, Brad Feld, Robert Simon and Bill Paseman. We also could have easily taken many a wrong turn if not for our advisors Scott Rafer, Christopher Michel and Mark Goines. And very special thanks to our resident vet Eric Barchas, DVM, who has been with us since woof one.

We would of course like to thank everyone who has ever worked at Dogster, Inc. (over 30 people!) including Ellen Dunne, David Dobbs, Greg Olson, Craig Walsey, and Leef Smith. Some big shout outs to people who helped before there was even money to pay for anything: Arin Fishkin, Patchen Haggerty, Alex Hart, Candace Locklear, Yuko Graham, Michael Grodsky and Billy Sirr among others. And while there are more names then I could gather, a profound geek tip of the hat to the developers of all the open source software that has powered over 95% of our technology stack to this day. Open source licensing and development is the true engine of growth behind the last 10 years.

Lastly we want to end where we started, with our community. Without this amazing group of passionate, caring, helpful concerned people from around the world Dogster and Catster would just be piles of fancy server code and images. So here’s to the future and what we make of it together.

Ted, John & Steven