Aaqib Gadit and the business of giving time back

The gong sounded in Karachi on January 5, 2023. Aaqib Gadit was at the Pakistan Stock Exchange to mark the sale of Cloudways to DigitalOcean, a transaction agreed at $350 million. A business built around the rather unglamorous task of making websites easier to run had earned a very public celebration. Cloud hosting had acquired a soundtrack.

For Gadit, the occasion brought two parts of his working life into the same room: the Pakistani technology community in which he had built companies, and the American cloud business he had joined. DigitalOcean chief executive Yancey Spruill was there. Lord Aamer Sarfraz struck the gong. The software had travelled further than its founders’ early doubters expected.

The purchase price makes an obvious opening. The more interesting question is what people were paying for. Cloudways helped businesses avoid spending their days managing the machinery beneath their websites. Gadit had made a business of returning other people’s attention to them. After the acquisition, he would become responsible for revenue across DigitalOcean. Then he would go back to building.

A programmer notices the unpaid job

Gadit’s route into business began with technical work. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering at NED University of Engineering and Technology. By 2008, he was working on businesses in web development and cybersecurity. His early ventures included Gaditek and PureVPN; Cloudways followed in 2012. The progression ran from building technology to understanding who could actually use it.

His explanation of Cloudways’ origin begins with an awkward mismatch. Small business owners and agency founders could do valuable work for their customers, yet application and infrastructure management kept eating their time. Larger enterprises could spread those tasks across specialists. A smaller agency might have to squeeze them between the work that paid the bills.

Cloud computing offered possibilities, along with a fresh collection of decisions. Someone still had to choose infrastructure, deploy applications and keep everything running. A designer who could make a WordPress site look beautiful did not automatically want a second career administering servers. Technology had opened a door and left a fairly substantial instruction manual in the doorway.

Gadit and his co-founders built Cloudways around that gap. It combined application, infrastructure and cloud management in a service aimed at smaller businesses. The ambition was practical: make the cloud usable enough that an agency could get back to its clients. This gave the business a clear customer and a recognisable problem before it had an acquisition price.

The customer was allowed to change the plan

At first, Cloudways used AWS exclusively. Its founders spent hours each day speaking with customers, trying to understand where support and usability could improve. Those conversations exposed another group they could serve: developers at agencies and web shops who wanted a simpler, more affordable way to deploy sites. The original infrastructure choice could only take the business so far.

Cloudways began working with DigitalOcean in 2014. The relationship offered a way to broaden its reach among small and medium-sized businesses. It also put the company alongside a developer community whose tutorials and emphasis on simplicity suited its own customers. A supplier relationship became a route to people Cloudways wanted to understand.

There was a similar lesson in its work with Linode. Customers asked for that provider more than 200 times through forums, social media and formal requests. When Cloudways introduced Linode in 2017, more than 200 customer servers were running on it. The requests had become something people used. For a product team, that is a pleasantly literal form of market research.

Choice still required restraint. Cloudways selected partners according to reliability, cost, simplicity and trust. A long list of infrastructure providers would have looked impressive on a comparison page; each additional relationship also had to work when a customer needed help. Gadit’s approach gave the company room to expand without treating every available option as an obligation.

“We are very selective in picking the right ones.”

Aaqib Gadit, on cloud infrastructure partners

The responsibility remained close to home. A problem with the underlying infrastructure would damage Cloudways’ reputation with its customers. Its team also borrowed ideas from Linode’s support and training protocols when developing its own support operation. Even a company selling simplicity needed people, processes and dependable partners behind the screen.

Eight years as partners, then a purchase

By August 2022, the DigitalOcean relationship had lasted eight years. About half of Cloudways’ customers were using DigitalOcean infrastructure. When the companies announced their acquisition agreement, they were already entangled in the useful, everyday sense: one helped power the service the other sold. The buyer had years of experience watching the business work.

The numbers in the announcement gave that familiarity financial weight. Cloudways was expected to generate more than $52 million in revenue for 2022, with a three-year compound annual growth rate above 50%. These were forecasts at the time of the deal. Alongside the growth, the business was generating free cash flow, giving the acquisition story substance beyond a busy sign-up counter.

DigitalOcean agreed to buy Cloudways for $350 million in cash, with a significant part of the consideration payable over 30 months after closing. The transaction closed on September 1. Ten years after Cloudways’ founding, a bootstrapped company had become part of a listed cloud provider. That is the clean chronology; the day-to-day work behind it was considerably less tidy.

Gadit’s public response was full of names. He thanked co-founders Pere Hospital, Uzair Gadit and Umair Gadit, then colleagues, advisers and the DigitalOcean leadership. He also recalled the scepticism about building a global software business from Pakistan. His version of the achievement placed the team and community in the foreground, where the acquisition headline had room for only two company names.

After the sale came the revenue job

The acquisition changed Gadit’s responsibilities. He became senior vice president and general manager of Cloudways, then DigitalOcean’s chief revenue officer in January 2023. The promotion put him in charge of the organisation’s revenue-related go-to-market work. Understanding the small business customer was now a responsibility across a much larger operation.

In announcing the appointment, Spruill singled out Gadit’s knowledge of those customers. That helps explain the connection between the founder role and the executive job. Cloudways had grown by learning which burdens its customers wanted to hand over. DigitalOcean wanted to reach more of those customers. The new title gave Gadit a broader place to apply what he had learned.

His own writing kept returning to the same audience. In a January 2024 letter to independent software vendors, he discussed the needs of startups and growing digital businesses, setting out DigitalOcean’s emphasis on ease of use, its platform and its developer community. Even from the revenue office, his subject was the experience of people trying to build something.

That chapter had an end date. Gadit stepped down as chief revenue officer on July 22, 2024, when Larry D’Angelo took over. He continued as an adviser through October 30. The sequence matters: there was an acquisition, an executive role and a transition before his public return to entrepreneurial work at Disrupt.com.

Back at the table, with more chairs

In February 2025, Disrupt.com announced a $100 million commitment to build and back technology ventures. Gadit was back alongside Uzair and Umair as a founding partner. The three had grown up in the same household; their business relationships had roots well beyond a shared investor presentation. Their new work carried experience from the companies they had already built.

The venture builder offers three ways to work: creating companies internally, building alongside outside founders, and investing. Its co-building model supplies engineering, commercial and operational support. There is a family resemblance to Cloudways’ original proposition. Founders have work they need to do, and other work they need done well. Disrupt offers to share some of the latter.

AI is central to the investment agenda, alongside interests in cybersecurity, Web3, automotive technology and retail. Gadit’s current company biography describes him as driving AI-first company building. The products are changing, but the operating questions remain familiar: who needs this, how will it reach them, and can the organisation support the business it hopes to become?

His connections also extend beyond his own ventures. He is a founding board member of Endeavor Pakistan, whose board includes Careem co-founder Mudassir Sheikha. In 2026, the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival listed him for a discussion on scaling technology companies in the Middle East. The geography of his work now links Pakistan, the UAE and the international markets his companies serve.

The discipline he wants to repeat

There is an appealing tension in this next chapter. Gadit is backing new technologies with a business history built around patient customer work. Disrupt’s current presentation puts operating discipline at the centre of its identity. A promising idea still needs an organisation capable of turning it into something customers can depend on.

“Bootstrap the discipline. The valuation follows.”

Aaqib Gadit · Disrupt.com

That line suits the route he has taken. An engineering education, conversations with agency developers, selected infrastructure partners, a sale and a revenue role have all contributed to his working vocabulary. The $350 million figure is memorable. So is the smaller detail of a company listening until customers had asked for a provider more than 200 times.

The gong in Karachi marked a completed transaction. Gadit’s work since then has returned him to the unfinished part of business: helping people assemble teams, products and customers into something that lasts. After a decade spent making the cloud easier to manage, he is working on the organisations that build what comes next. There will, presumably, still be support requests.