Editor's Note
Through different offices, different teams, and different technologies, we have learned and evolved as a team.
As we celebrate our 25th anniversary, we’re looking back at that history through the people who helped create it — and the experiences that made Terakeet who we are today.
A lot has happened in 25 years. Justin and Britney broke up. The iPod, then the iPhone launched. Ice buckets were dumped. Google became a verb. “Social media” and “search engine optimization” became common phrases.
At Terakeet, change is baked into our DNA. Since 2001, our three employees have become more than 200. One team became 23 departments. Twenty employees left and found their way back. Syracuse became one of 139 employee cities. Our employee-run nonprofit, Cause For The Cuse, reached more than 20,000 students.
We’re proud of those numbers, and of the evolution behind them.
Terakeet has never stayed in one place for very long. As the market changed, our work changed with it, from early voice recognition technology to search visibility to reputation management in the age of generative AI.
Terakeet has been built by people who learned new skills because the work demanded it — sometimes building careers in areas they hadn’t even considered when they joined. Those who became managers, mentors, and experts. Who made mistakes and got better and questioned the way we’d always done things. Who shared what they knew.
“Our tools and our capabilities and our client roster, and even our physical footprint have changed. The fundamental DNA of our people, in my opinion, hasn’t shifted at all,” says VP of Human Resources Jenni Thornton. “The underlying thread through my entire tenure here at Terakeet, really, probably through all 25 years of Terakeet, is the genuine strength of our partnership with one another.”
Over two and a half decades, our team has created an organization that our co-founders Mac Cummings and Patrick Danial couldn’t have planned for way back in 2001.
“For 25 years, Terakeet’s growth has been driven by a team willing to learn, experiment and build,” says Mac Cummings, CEO and Co-Founder of Terakeet. “Our people have continually found new ways to turn new ideas into meaningful impact for our clients. That spirit of innovation has been part of Terakeet since the beginning.”
Each transition required more than a new strategy. It required people willing to become good at something new, or find new ways to apply their skills.
“We have this ‘why not, let’s do it, try it out’ attitude and I think we continuously surprise ourselves in terms of what we’re capable of,” agrees Chief Brand Officer Shannon Reedy. “Setting out large growth and performance goals with this fearlessness has really gotten us to where we are today. That characteristic, I think, has taken us into really exciting rooms and put us alongside exceptional talent. It’s a great value and characteristic of the company.”
Below, we take a walk through time, stopping at every five-year milestone to capture just how much evolution our strategy and team have driven for the business.
Terakeet Snapshots in Time
2001
The founding and naming of Terakeet is stuff of legend in our offices. After founding Moneycrawler and Mindshark Consulting, CEO & Co-Founder Mac Cummings and Co-Founder Patrick Danial visited a call center and heard its employees “chirping like birds.” They realized there was an opportunity to help that organization work more efficiently with speech recognition technology, and a new company was born.
“After a day of deliberation, we had our name: TERAKEET,” says Mac. “The data, in the form of terabytes, combined with those parakeets, speaking back to customers.”
Soon, they hired a small but mighty team in Syracuse, New York.
2006
Following the dot-com boom, we recognized just how much search engines had transformed how people discovered information online. So we transformed too. By 2005, SEO had become a core part of our offering, and the company started building a reputation not only as a search visibility partner but as a growing Syracuse employer with big ambitions. This era laid the groundwork for the expertise and client relationships that would shape the next chapter of the business.
As Mac tells it, “We started solving real problems in search, building systems that connected brands with publishers and influenced how companies were discovered online. Over time, we found product-market fit. We found a measurable impact on customer revenue. The company grew. We built a team and a business that worked.”
2011
Ten years in, Terakeet took a deliberate look inward.
Mac and Pat worked with a business coach to define Terakeet’s vision, values and goals for the first time, putting language around the culture and ambitions that had been developing since 2001. At the same time, a new organizational structure gave the company the foundation it needed to grow, helping Terakeet more than double in size.
We also expanded our offerings to include reputation management, supporting new client needs as consumer behavior became more and more focused in the digital world.
But the startup mentality of rolling up our sleeves and getting the work done remained. As Shannon remembers, sometimes that looked like laying the new office floor tiles ourselves once the clock hit 5 p.m., or pounding the pavement to pitch new clients.
“We were a very different organization than we are today,” says Jenni, who joined Terakeet in 2014. “Back then, we were essentially operating with a classic, high-energy startup culture, centered entirely in Central New York. We had a very early-career workforce that was exceptionally eager and creative and hardworking. We were working side-by-side in the office, signing up for kitchen duty, enjoying a beer together after work, and bonding at summer picnics.”
2016
Terakeet started pushing the boundaries of both who we could serve and how we could work. We adopted our now-standard Flexible Work Arrangement Policy, signed our first Fortune 50 customer, and began our work with Rapid Enterprise Development (RED) to continually elevate our strategy. By being more strategic and enterprise-focused, we began to scale the caliber of our clients and the impact of our work.
Kevin Hassett, Director of Technical Project Management, joined Terakeet in 2011, and has seen much of this evolution himself:
2021
Twenty years after Terakeet began in Syracuse, our workplace looked radically different. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Terakeet embraced a fully remote model and found new ways to collaborate across distance. We established two employee resource groups (ERGs) to build new opportunities for connection and advocacy, and were named a Best Workplace by Glassdoor, Inc., and Fortune!
Jenni remembers that these initiatives were driven by our interest in building the best workforce.
“One of the things I love about Terakeet is how we embrace this evolution of the company,” said Patrick Lane, Sr. Marketing Manager, who actually started his career at Terakeet, left for another opportunity, then rejoined our team. “We’re never just standing still. I think it goes back to that entrepreneurial mindset we all have, and it’s very energizing to be surrounded by people who are not going to shy away from the challenge of reinventing something, whether that is a process within the company or the company as a whole.”
2026
Twenty-five years after our founding, we’ve reinvented ourselves again. With AI changing how users discover, evaluate, and understand brands, we stepped in to help our clients manage their brand visibility and perception. We centered reputation as our core offering, built proprietary AI technology to augment our work, and drove record performance that fueled new possibilities.
Terakeet now partners with world-class brands and drives impact on a global scale. Shannon shares, “As someone who’s been here for many years, it’s been really exciting to get our start with a lot of local organizations in Syracuse and continue to move up market from working with startup and challenger brands to being on this global stage with some of the biggest organizations in the world.”
On the HR side of the business, Jenni has experienced a similar feeling: “The scale, the depth, and the sophistication of what we do today are vastly different. Watching that shift organically over the company’s 25-year history has been really rewarding.”
Today, Terakeet looks very different from how it did in 2001, and that’s the point. Every version of this company has been shaped by the people willing to learn, adapt, build, and bring others along with them. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped get us here, and excited for what we build next.
