---
title: "Honoring the Spark: Spiceworks Employee Number 1"
description: "Spiceworks' 20th-anniversary podcast opens its series with the company's first hire — the garage phase, the bet on community-driven IT, and twenty years of the Spiceworks Community."
publishDate: 2026-06-26
canonical: https://www.mandalivia.com/talks/honoring-the-spark/
---

For its 20th anniversary, Spiceworks opened its retrospective podcast series "at the very beginning" — with its first employee. The episode covers the garage phase before the company had an office, the early conviction that IT would become community-driven, and how those first product decisions shaped what the [Spiceworks Community](https://community.spiceworks.com/) grew into over twenty years.

The [SpiceWorld](/talks/spiceworld/) sessions on this site are the conference-stage half of the same story.