When should a dedicated CEO take care of the company?

Summary: Editor's note: The author is Mark Suster, partner of GRP Partners, a renowned investment agency. Students who want to read more Mark Suster articles can click here. When should a dedicated CEO take care of the company? This problem has been too many people talking about

Editor's note: The author of this article is Mark Suster, partner of GRP Partners, a renowned investment agency. Students who want to read more Mark Suster articles can click here.

When should a dedicated CEO take care of the company?

There are too many people talking about this problem. Many Silicon Valley founders are aware of this problem when they find that their shallow experience will directly limit the company's development.

So, when should a technical CEO take care of the company?

Not many people seem to be talking.

However, if you are sensitive to changes in the market in recent years, you will find that technology is the most important factor. Larry page returns to Google, as CEO, is a typical example.

The problem is that Google already has Eric Schmidt. Why do you need Larry Page?

I think Google is stimulated by--mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley's tech-new leader.

The world has changed so fast that the rapid development of the internet has given Mark Zuckerberg the opportunity to paddle his own lightweight boat over a large cruise ship in a cumbersome, bureaucratic, traditional internet industry. Larry Page's return appears to be a Google effort to streamline institutions, enhance innovation and competitiveness.

Larry Page's return is not the only case of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs is perhaps the most well-known example. But Steve Jobs is not the "technical CEO" of the return, because he replaced the person--john Scully, itself is a technical fan-like.

More recently we have seen a situation like the CEO of Matte Mullenweg (founder of Worldpress) 8 years after his successor.

We seem to be able to see a pattern that starts with a professional business management that pushes the company forward, while technology leaders focus on how to be the industry leader and wait until the technical leaders experience a bit longer.

The idea is that I've been dealing with Nick Halstead as CEO of DataSift.

The whole story is developed like this:

I saw Nick Halstead for the first time in 2009 when he was running a company called TweetMeme (the predecessor of DataSift) and helped Twitter develop an earlier version of the API. He introduced me to many of the technical underpinnings of Twitter and why Twitter's data were particularly valuable.

He focuses not only on the data of the tweets themselves, but also on others such as which users saw the tweet, where the tweet was pushed, what device was pushed, what time period was pushed, and so on.

More importantly, he sees the possibility of extrapolation from some data. He points out that Twitter is a link to fans, and fans find data that is read by a shared source, which implies a much larger value than the tweets themselves.

He is the kind that lets you think listens to June words, wins reads ten years the book, each and he has had some exchanges, feels oneself to the science and technology profession future has the new cognition.

We've been talking about this for 18 months. When the time is ripe, we formally begin to cooperate. When Roger Ehrenberg and I decided to vote for his first round of VC financing, he was working as CEO in a British company.

In the process of financing, we asked him if he agreed to hire a new CEO in North America to help him manage his operations in the North American market, he agreed, and felt it was best for the company's interests.

He was responsible for technical and strategic matters in the UK, as well as a board member and CTO.

Then we came to Rob Bailey as CEO. At that time, it was the best decision we could make.

Rob Bailey also led the company to achieve rapid development. Under his leadership, the company's corporate customers grew more than 1000, gaining more than 60 million dollars in investment and becoming the fastest growing company in the SaaS industry. I also learned a lot from Rob Bailey. I hope to work with him if possible.

So why is Nick Halstead going back to being CEO again?

Our industry is growing too fast, so the growth and wealth that technology leaders can bring to the company cannot be overlooked. If there is a slight mistake in this regard, the company is likely to collapse. John Sculley has said such a thing in his release of jobs:

"I did not have the breadth of experience at that time to really appreciate ethically how different motivate are when you are shaping Industry, as Bill Gates did or Steve Jobs did, versus when you ' re a competitor in a industry, in a public company, where Don t Make mistakes because if you are lose, you are out.

There is an important word in it, shaping an industry, reshaping an industry.

This is the opportunity we now face.

Our company did develop well in the past, but you have to admit that the industry has begun to change.

18 months ago, Nick Halstead was working on a project that I call Manhattan Project, which is likely to be a big leap in the company's growth history, as it redefined the internal and external data management patterns of corporate customers in terms of public, social, and large data.

At the same time, Nick is not just content to provide customers with internal data management, external and internal data integration of these things, he believes that the development of a machine learning ability to identify, integrate different data types of management engine, is the best choice. He called the project an autonomous Vedo.

After Topsy and Gnip were bought separately by Apple and Google, we currently have only one independent provider of real-time data streams. During Nick's time as CTO, we have built a strong enterprise data management platform, and this platform in different data levels of enterprise customers have a strong ability to transplant and transform, but also in the analysis of large data is effective.

We believe that, based on such a situation, Nick is ready to return to the post of CEO, will lead the company to a qualitative leap.