Looking Back at 2025: A Year of Metamorphosis

by Husein Sharaf

by Husein Sharaf

January 01 2026 Blog

When I sat down to think about all the things I could write about to sum up the year, it immediately felt overwhelming. So much has changed about our organization; the customers we serve, the product we deliver, and even the makeup of our team. So, what’s any bright tech executive to do in this situation? Well, turn to AI of course! …except I knew in my heart of hearts that it would fail to capture the nuance, the context, the essence of what made this year such a defining moment in our history and so impactful for me personally. AI is wonderful for so many things, and yet there’s something special about the fragile imperfection of a purely human perspective these days. 

So, I decided to write this one all on my own, which I recognize is completely counterintuitive for an organization that has been redefined by AI in 2025. I would call it a “transformational” year, but that implies we’ve become something entirely different. The truth is we entered this year as an incredible consulting firm, with standout services and a nascent product, delivered by humans that care—and we’re ending the year as a product business, with an incredible platform now available to millions of people globally, delivered by humans that care. What we (and now the broader industry) have realized this year is that AI on its own won’t have the impact most leaders hoped or expected it might. Magic only happens when the humans are taught to fish, and the teachers are a combination of human experts and great tools.  

With that realization in mind, we doubled down on many of the things that made us a great consulting firm, to make us an even greater product business. We collaborated with our partners at Microsoft to document and share incredible success stories, even publishing our first ever joint eBook on the democratization of AI in Higher Education.  We ramped up our Cloud + AI Meetup, quickly becoming one of the most well-attended and highly-rated tech collectives in the DC-metro area, covering topics from AI security to the impacts of AI on healthcare. We hosted AI Agent-building Bootcamps, free for any community member or student to attend and learn hands-on from our SMEs. We visited dozens of university campuses to share our knowledge and hear input directly from students and educators, from east coast favorites like the University of Maryland and Dartmouth College, to Stanford and UCLA on the west coast, to Cambridge, Oxford, and Manchester in the UK.  

We also fed our own curiosities, by attending conferences like EDUCAUSE, HDAA, BETT UK, TechEx, and Microsoft Ignite— while equally feeding our deeply-rooted desire to contribute to other worthy causes, with efforts like biking 100 miles in New Jersey on a hot and damp day in September with “Team Microsoft” to raise awareness (and over $50,000) for the millions of people that battle Multiple Sclerosis every day, or packing hundreds of care packages for those in need this holiday season. And we were rewarded in more ways than one, earning a coveted Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for the first time in our 15-year history, on top of several best workplaces features in national publications like Fortune and Inc. 

Just as much as we worked tirelessly to contribute to our partners, clients, and community externally, we were arguably working 10x harder internally to address our gaps—building brand new business units like Customer Success and Product Support—and increasing our headcount by 45% to stay ahead of demand and attempt to reduce teammate burnout. All of this while we were simultaneously investing heavily in developing a novel product, our nebulaONE® platform, without no outside institutional investment. To say my role went quickly from CEO to full-time fundraiser would be an understatement, and anyone following the Venture Capital markets would know just how horrific my timing was to “learn on the job” this year.  

The task of convincing VCs that what’s required to win in the age of AI is investing in “people businesses,” which historically has been the anti-pattern of what they seek, was an exercise in learning to hear (and ignore) the words “no,” “not now,” and “get out” more times than I care to admit. It was a great lesson in resilience, and in holding true to a dogmatic belief in our own intuition. Thankfully, as we rounded out the year, we found not one but two venture partners that recognized precisely what we did, that the age of AI will require everyone (Silicon Valley included) to rethink what it takes to build and scale great products and prolific businesses—what it truly means to be labeled a “frontier firm”. Those same partners are now equity owners of a slice of Cloudforce, and we’re eager to share more on all the new doors we’ll be opening together in 2026.  

And that brings me back to the main topic of this reflection: Metamorphosis is change at work, where nothing is lost—only reformed—so what emerges is better and more beautiful, but is still made of what it has always been. That’s precisely how I feel about the company Cloudforce has become this year; bigger, tougher, and clearly more valuable—something that appears entirely novel and unique on the outside, while underneath consisting of the same core components (most notably the people) that made it great all along.  We have a saying around here that you better “catch the butterfly” to ensure the outcome of all your hard work is never lost, and I think now more than ever we’ve caught the butterfly, and it’s only just begun its ascendance. 🦋

Check out a few clips below from our annual holiday getaway, with reflections from the team.