Mark Gavalda and the business of having fewer answers

Evelin Nagy had a reasonable question for Mark Gavalda. It was February 2018, she was joining Kinsta, and human resources would initially be a department of one. What, precisely, was she supposed to do? Gavalda, the hosting company’s co-founder and then CEO, supplied an answer unlikely to make it into a recruitment brochure: “I don’t know - you tell us!”

There was a vision. There were initiatives. There was also plenty of work whose shape had yet to be decided. Nagy became the company’s 24th employee, handling recruitment, administration and accounting while constructing processes as she went. The founder’s admission left her with considerable room to act. Some employers offer a seat at the table. This one appeared to be asking her to help assemble the furniture.

That exchange provides a useful entry into Gavalda’s career. He has been a developer, an online marketing executive and the CEO of a company whose job is to make other people’s websites dependable. The work rewards technical knowledge. But his story also turns on recognizing where someone else should supply the answer.

In September 2025, that principle reached the top job. Jon Penland, who had joined Kinsta as a support engineer in late 2016, became CEO. Gavalda stayed as founder, chairman and board member. The business that once needed its founders close to every customer now had a leader who had learned it from the customer’s end of the conversation.

“I don’t know - you tell us!”

Mark Gavalda, recalled by Evelin Nagy

The question after the website

Before hosting came marketing and web development. Gavalda led MandLoys Online Marketing from 2008 into 2014, working across services that included web design and conversion optimization. His education included attendance at Budapest College of Communication and Business in 2005 and 2006. The subsequent career put him among the people building the web for clients who had other things to do.

Kinsta’s four founders were Mark Gavalda, Anita Dunai, Peter Sziraki and Tom Zsomborgi. They were working with WordPress websites when an awkward recurring question arrived at the end of projects: where should the finished site live? Recommending a hosting provider ought to have been routine. Instead, disappointing support and service made the recommendation difficult.

A website may look finished when the design is approved. For its owner, that is merely the beginning of the obligation. Someone must keep it running, protect it and deal with the moments when visitors arrive in numbers nobody expected. The founders were handing over work whose next stage they could not confidently recommend.

They founded Kinsta in 2013. Their familiarity with WordPress gave them a place to begin; the repeated customer request gave them a reason. The move from agency work to hosting took roughly six to twelve months, as they wound down development and marketing to concentrate on the new business. The question that followed every project had become the project.

Customers paid for the next chapter

Kinsta began with the founders’ own money and grew by reinvesting revenue. The appeal of recurring subscriptions was obvious to people accustomed to finding the next client and fitting the next project into limited working hours. Hosting offered continuity. It also meant accepting responsibility long after the invoice for a website might otherwise have been filed away.

The early company had to persuade people to trust a service with little history. Its first product lacked features the founders wanted to add. They launched anyway and improved it while customers were already using it. A staging environment, more detailed analytics and other conveniences came later. An unfinished checklist had to coexist with a working service.

That restraint was financial as well as technical. The founders wanted to retain ownership and were comfortable with a more controlled pace of growth. A paying customer helped finance the next improvement. In that arrangement, promises had a short route back to the people who would judge whether they were being kept.

There is a particular discipline in this kind of business. A sale begins a relationship that must survive the next renewal. The buyer can admire an elegant dashboard and still leave if a practical problem goes unanswered. Gavalda’s career would repeatedly bring him back to that less glamorous measure of success: what happens when somebody needs help?

A complaint becomes a conversation

Harsh Agrawal, founder of ShoutMeLoud, remembers Gavalda reaching out on Twitter while he was discussing hosting frustrations. They spoke on Skype, and ShoutMeLoud moved to Kinsta. Agrawal also remembers the CEO personally answering support requests. The account is revealing because the encounter began where a polished sales funnel usually ends: with a customer already irritated.

Agrawal’s publishing business had grown more demanding. A busy site carries several kinds of activity at once, from reading and commenting to selling digital products. A hosting problem interrupts all of them. To someone running that operation, a conversation with a person who understands the technical details can carry more weight than another list of features.

Gavalda had experienced the other side of that relationship. In 2014, Kinsta’s Stripe account was abruptly closed. He wrote publicly about the experience; within hours of publication, Stripe contacted the company and reinstated the account. He later described speaking with Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and UK executive Andy Young.

His follow-up acknowledged the response and welcomed Stripe as a business partner. The lesson he drew concerned communication and taking responsibility when a customer is stranded. It was an instructive reversal: the hosting founder had become a small customer inside someone else’s much larger system. The quality of the product mattered. So did getting an actual person to pay attention.

The engineer’s appetite for a traffic spike

Gavalda’s interest in service rested on technical experience. He came to hosting with a developer’s understanding of WordPress, and Kinsta’s move onto Google Cloud offered more room to handle sudden changes in demand. A quiet website and a suddenly famous website have rather different requirements, sometimes separated by the duration of a television appearance.

DARTDrones provided a concrete test. Before appearing on Shark Tank, the company discussed preparations for its WooCommerce site with Kinsta’s support engineers. During the heavy six-hour period after the broadcast, the site received 1,263,233 requests and stayed online. The number makes an abstract promise about scale unusually easy to picture: publicity arrived, and the front door remained open.

“Google Compute Engine can scale dramatically,” Gavalda said. The attraction was practical. Customers sometimes needed substantial resources at short notice, and the infrastructure made that possible. His enthusiasm belongs to the machinery underneath the finished website, the part visitors generally notice only when it stops working.

That is a curious achievement for a developer to pursue. A successful result may look entirely uneventful to the public. People open pages, browse products and continue with their day. The host’s careful preparations disappear into ordinary use. For the customer expecting a wave of attention, ordinary is a perfectly respectable outcome.

Learning to leave room

Away from the executive title, Gavalda describes himself through a quieter pair of details: an urban cyclist and an autodidact. His published work ranges from the history of WordPress to a lengthy guide to website speed. There is a continuity between learning how systems behave and explaining those systems to people trying to use them.

His public LinkedIn profile lists English and Hungarian at native or bilingual proficiency, along with fluent Spanish. It places him in Switzerland. The geographical spread is consistent with a career inside a company built to work across borders, though the day-to-day challenge of a distributed business is usually less picturesque than its map.

A colleague in another country needs a clear decision, a comprehensible process and the authority to get on with the job. Hosting customers need someone available when their own working day begins. Distance makes assumptions expensive. A message that seems obvious to its sender can become a small administrative mystery several time zones away.

Penland’s recollections of working with Gavalda suggest a founder selective about borrowed management methods. Introducing objectives and key results required persuasion. Gavalda wanted to know whether an approach made sense for Kinsta. Meanwhile, he encouraged Penland to hand routine responsibilities to specialists so that the operating chief could spend time on wider company questions. Delegation had to create useful room.

The support queue reaches the boardroom

Penland’s route to CEO gives that room a visible outcome. He first wrote for Kinsta as a freelancer, then joined support late in 2016 and became chief operating officer in July 2018. He worked across sales, operations and customer success, and served on the board before taking over as chief executive in September 2025.

The handover made the company’s accumulated experience part of its succession plan. Someone who had dealt with customer questions would now oversee the business answering them. Gavalda praised Penland’s knowledge of the organization and stayed involved through the chairman’s role. His stated aim was to keep the company’s interests aligned with its customers’ success.

The reach is now far beyond the founders’ first projects. Kinsta reports serving customers across 128 countries. A business created because four people could not confidently recommend a host has become a service used across much of the world. That scale changes the work: personal attention has to be supported by people, processes and infrastructure capable of repeating it.

Return to Nagy’s question in 2018, and Gavalda’s answer acquires a little more significance. A founder can know how to build a server, understand a customer’s complaint and still need someone else to decide how a department should work. Eventually, he can need someone else to run the company. Gavalda remains in the business, with a different title and a longer view. The next answer belongs to the team he helped build.