We launched as myGengo on December 18, 2008. And, to be completely honest, during that early period we had no idea what we were doing. We had an online order form, a few dozen tested translators and an idea that we would like to offer simple, human translation.

Today, six years on, we’re close to 300 million words translated, we have nearly 13,500 translators earning money through our platform, about 50 employees and thousands of customers going global at a scale we never imagined when we started. The power of 5-10% monthly growth compounded over several years is a tremendous thing.

We’ve exposed some of these numbers (and some of the more painful ones too) on our new Open Data site. It’s one of the biggest initiatives we’ve launched this year, and I’m confident it’s the start of something really interesting for Gengo and our industry. I believe the future lies in more openness like this—with our customers, with our translators and with ourselves.

While those numbers are interesting, above all else, startups are learning experiences. I believe you can learn more by starting a company than by doing almost any other activity in the world, and you can learn almost as much by joining a young one. We’ve all learned a lot this year, through mistakes, failures, errors, blunders, miscalculations, over-optimism and hubris—most of all myself. If there’s something all Gengons know, it’s that this learning is the most important thing about being here.

Along with that learning, I feel extremely lucky that the company we founded is just an extremely fun place to be. Some “inside Gengo” moments from this year that stick out for me:

• Celebrating the birth of four new Gengo babies
• Watching everyone share their ideas at our spring Gengonference
• Seeing (and handling) the truly shocking spectrum of content that our customers order through our platform
• Watching our engineering team launch our most complex site update ever, including our new Translator Workbench, in absolute peace
• Having two of our oldest Gengons make the move to the US
• Tasting a Gengon’s home-brewed pumpkin beer with our San Mateo team
• Going on afternoon jaunts to Kaffeehaus in San Mateo for tea and croissants and playing Friday morning music with donuts before our all-hands in Tokyo
• Poking fun at Gengo’s internal “Job Forking” code
• Experiencing in-person demos of awesome hackathon projects from every engineering team member
• …and hundreds more

So here’s to 2014, a year of growth, challenges and openness. We’re looking forward to Gengo’s sixth year, hoping it’s one of more growth, more focus and millions more translations.

Happy birthday to us! Thanks for being right there with us.