Kirkland-based BitTitan is like Jack’s magic beanstalk, it just keeps growing.

A tech startup formed in 2007 by CEO Geeman Yip, the initially one-man company offering cloud solutions has experienced 700 percent year-on-year growth. An IT change automation company specializing in data migration and onboarding, they moved to their current Kirkland office at 3933 Lake Washington Blvd NE early this year.

On top of expanding outside the United States, the company recently added three new executives to help manage their rapidly-increasing number of employees. Jennifer Martin was promoted to vice president of global sales in August, Rocco Seyboth joined BitTitan in July as vice president and general manager of products, while Barnett Silver came on board in October as vice president of finance.

Yip said being able to hire the new executives is a huge milestone for the company, as he didn’t take a wage for the first four years. He added the new team will help guide their specific departments, mentor and train those underneath them, and ensure the company remains profitable as it continues to expand.

“We needed someone really [who] is strong from a go-to market perspective,” he said about sales. “I’m an engineer, we’re used to an engineer-centric company. We create products, throw it over to sales and it’s their job to figure it out. I wanted to think holistically by creating a long-term roadmap and message versus creating products without any sort of message or cohesive message from month-to-month.”

The financial management will also help BitTitan, which relies on no venture capital, he said.

“I think of tomorrow. I think of what’s going to happen three to five years from now,” he said. “Your mentality begins to shift. From a finance side, it’s very surprising. A lot of people I talk to think it’s amazing to grow into a business of our size with a finance department with no VP of finance in the company. We literally have two people on our finance staff, and I did all the finance up until that point. It’s a huge burden for finance. When you spend $20 million and there’s no funding, it’s a very stressful job.”

Even as the company grows, Yip said he is determined to maintain a close-knit company culture, one of the things that inspired him to create the company in the first place. A Microsoft employee at the time, he said he initially worked on a small team and established strong relationships with his coworkers, but as the years passed that feeling was lost. During a vacation in 2006, he said he was determined to get it back.

“You really think about what you want in life and that’s what I wanted,” he said. “I set forward to find or create a company that could get that back for me again. Life is just too short to me. I didn’t know what technology or what I was going to do.”

“I have a lot of ideas,” he added. “Ideas are cheap. One of them I had in late 2006 was around cloud computing.”

At the time, the concept of cloud computing was in its infancy, and while it offered great opportunity, he said that it also posed numerous challenges for selling the product.

“People really didn’t trust storing data in the cloud,” he said. “Back at that day there wasn’t a lot of the backup services that we have today.”

This also prevented him from securing venture capital for the company.

“Nobody understood file sharing,” he said. “Timing really is everything, because the market’s not ready no matter how good your product is.”

Forced to fund it entirely on his own, he said he liquidated all his assets and took out a second mortgage to create a datacenter, including a quarter of a million lines of code.

Still at Microsoft, he said he finally came up with MigrationWiz, which moves data from one cloud provider to another and from an on-premise solution to the cloud. At the time, the migrations were done manually, but now the process has been streamlined and no longer requires downtime for the client. Opening up an office in Redmond TownCenter in 2010, the company’s internal growth exploded after they moved back to Kirkland. In 2014, BitTitan’s employees tripled to 77, and now the company has reached 100. In the last year, 2.35 million users moved to the cloud, a 290 percent increase.

Yip said having it be a bootstrap-operated company has taught him how to run a company and think creatively.

“It’s really built the culture we have today,” he said. “It really is the foundation of our culture, of who we are. We work together, it doesn’t matter what it takes to get the job done.”

However, being bootstrapped meant it’s also constrained them in terms of hiring.

“When you’re bootstrapped I can’t afford to make everyone a VP,” he said. “I had to hire new people to the industry, and it was tough because as manager I take the role very seriously. It’s about mentoring people and helping them. Unfortunately, we just can’t hire managers and over time we’ve really tried to balance that out.”

The biggest challenge facing them right now, Yip said, is being able to grow fast enough to catch up with the growing demand for their services.

“We already have a vision for five years set out for what our roadmap looks like,” he said. “We know we have a long future ahead of us. I think from a product perspective, the challenge is really people. We’ve really been growing our team, but we can’t even take the money in front of us fast enough into the company. We can’t collect money fast enough because we don’t have enough people to collect it. I’m unable to bring in the revenue right in front of us, the lowest hanging fruit. I have people willing to give us money that I can’t even collect.”

While he’s looking to hire talent, he said the people have to be right for the company.

“I need people to innovate so we can continue to grow,” he said. “We want to be true to ourselves of why we started the company.”