10y
In the spirit of your advice of “be honest and transparent”, as CEO, I felt compelled to respond to your review. I will tackle them, one by one.
Leadership/Trust
As (newly appointed) CEO, I can’t give you an unbiased response to this, but I can tell you what I believe in, and how I run DataSift. Here’s what we do at DataSift:
Vision: Clear, common understanding of the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of where you want to be. Ours: Human Data in Every Decision. We want to enable companies (commercial businesses and NGOs) to drive decisions from the exponential growth in human-created data (human = data by you or about you)
Values: Our culture is driven by people who, every day, come in to work because they believe DataSift is a great place to be. Our values are: Customers are our business, Foundation of Respect, Pull Together, Be Bold and Brave, Trust = Velocity. We live by them, starting with the CEO downwards.
Company-wide alignment: What I learnt from 5 years at Salesforce.com is the value of company-wide alignment. We have a priority list of company-wide, measurable objectives we want to achieve this year. Every team builds their own mission plan from this high-level set of objectives. Then they go figure out the details and execute. This is similar to Salesforce.com’s V2MOM process, and Google’s OKR approach. It gives everyone the guidelines on what’s important, gets everyone working as a team, gives individuals a frame for how their contribution advances the company, and pushes decision making down to every individual. That way, no micro-management is needed as every employee makes the “right call” for the good of the company.
Communications on progress vs plan: Monthly town halls and company-wide comms to keep everyone in sync on how we are doing, progress vs goals, and obstacles. Trust comes through transparency.
"Nice to have" product / no innovation
You’re right, we lost Twitter as a data partner. But we also gained Facebook as a partner and built a new service (PYLON) to enable companies to extract insights from every post, comment and like across Facebook in a way that protects user privacy.
This new model is entirely new to the industry. I would say “innovative”, as it opens up the capability to analyse interactions from social networks that have previously been “dark” as are not fully public networks like Twitter.
With Facebook, companies can create market, brand and audience insights from the world’s biggest social network. As the #1 social network for marketers, gaining deeper insights across Facebook seems to me like a must-have. A growing number of product companies agree with us: http://datasift.com/partners/
As you know, unless you left the company many months ago, there’s more coming that we can’t publicly disclose yet.
Turnover
While your numbers are considerably off, we do lose good people sometimes. When someone shifts to another company to follow a career/growth ambition or passion, that’s part of business. All we can do is our best to make the work fun, rewarding and meaningful while you are here.
I'm sorry it didn’t work out for you at DataSift.
