Passing The Torch Back To The Founder
By Rob Bailey
After almost three years as CEO of DataSift, I will be leaving the role of CEO but remaining as a board member. Nick Halstead, the founder, has returned to the CEO role to take the company forward.
When I was brought in by Nick and the rest of the DataSift board it was to build a business around Nick’s founding vision. We have achieved this. The past few years have been an incredible time for DataSift. We signed over 1,000 corporate customers in 40 countries, expanded from 25 to 120 employees in 3 countries and raised over $60M+ in investor capital. We expanded from just working with Twitter to working with a wide variety of other networks like Tumblr and WordPress. When we began, we were the smallest of four social data syndicators (and the only one not based in the US). Thanks to an incredible team and the technology platform, DataSift grew fast and is now the leading social data platform. Even more exciting, the company has gradually expanded into other content areas like News and blog content with more news to come in the coming months.
I’m excited about transitioning the company back to the founder now that my original mandate has been accomplished. Founders returning to the CEO role is a successful strategy that has worked at many companies including Google, Apple and WordPress and can drive an accelerated rate of technology innovation which I think will be crucial for the coming years for DataSift. We want DataSift to be a public company one day, and it hasn’t escaped us that many of the great companies in tech that we admire like Facebook and Oracle are/have been led by yes, their technical founders. It has been great working with Nick building DataSift over the last few years. As a shareholder in the company, I’m looking forward to what Nick has planned.
It has been an incredible privilege to work at DataSift. The Engineering & Product teams based in Reading (UK) are some of the most impressive teams I’ve seen in 15 years in the tech industry. They have built a platform from the ground up to work real time unstructured data like Social takes a radically different approach to data that I believe will ultimately rival or (best) more well known Open Source technologies like Hadoop. (Read more about it in my blog post from last week, ‘The Paradox of Big Data’: http://bit.ly/1yNtG7j.)
I’m also very proud of the team we built in the US and Canada. The Sales and Client Services teams have built one of the fastest growing customer bases in the history of SaaS with a precision that I’ve never seen before.
Special thanks to the Board of Directors. Mark Suster (Upfront), Rory Driscoll (Scale Venture Partners), Roger Ehrenberg (IA Ventures), Chris Smart (Acacia Capital), Jeff Horing and Hilary Gosher (Insight Venture Partners) all of whom have been incredibly helpful in building the company to where it is today.
Effective immediately I will be joining Akkadian Venture Partners as a Venture Partner. Akkadian is a direct secondary investor with a portfolio of over twenty companies and well over $100M AUM. Akkadian has generated amazing returns over the past four years by investing in providing unique liquidity solutions to the management teams of high growth, mostly SaaS, companies. Key to their strategy has been Big Data mining of public data sources like news feeds to identify “hot” companies before other investors have. Some of their more notable investments include Splunk, DocuSign and RocketFuel. Their practical use of Big Data to create a competitive advantage inspired me to join DataSift.
Ultimately I love helping founders build companies. It is an incredible ride to be able to work with an entrepreneur like Nick Halstead. I look forward to working with more entrepreneurs like him in the future, both as an investor as an partner in growing companies.
