When Boulder-based social data provider Gnip started out six years ago, there was no clarity about what direction to take in an ill-defined space like social media; co-founder and CTO Jud Valeski said the team wasn’t even sure exactly who would want to consume public social content.
“We got it wrong -- 180 degrees wrong -- in the first 12 months,” Valeski said. But he said he is proud that during those 12 months, the team didn’t jump around month-to-month searching for a quick solution, but instead invested (quite a lot of!) time, energy and money. Then, after 12 months, it became increasingly clear that Gnip was floundering and Valeski said they jumped to change directions: “Steering the boat is painful and adjusting is no small task, but we are all in it to try to build product and try to make money; you’ve got to move on.”
Since then, Gnip has solidified its customer bases across industries such as ad tech, retail and finance, expanded its offerings to give customers both historical and real-time access to social data and also launched its “Plugged in to Gnip” program with partners such as Salesforce, Pivotal and Klout putting its data to use.
While straightening out where their product fit in the market, the team has grown to 82 employees (and counting!) and has made internal adjustments to deal with this growth - like moving Chris Moody from his COO role to CEO earlier this year. Stepping aside from his previous CEO role wasn’t a hard choice for Valeski because he said his main goal as a Gnip founder has always been to build the best product possible - not to build up his own ego.
“Is there someone else in the room that has more hands-on, direct experience?” Valeski said. “You constantly have to be evaluating that. If you have the option to bring someone else in that is theoretically better than you at something, then you have to take that [opportunity].”
With Moody now as manager, Gnip is headed down the path of global expansion. So far, they have opened offices in DC, New York and San Francisco in addition to “poking around” office spaces around the world to meet the demands of customers, one third of which are international.
Japan has become a big player in Gnip's international expansion, causing Valeski to frequent the 787 flight which coincidentally, yet conveniently, flies directly from Denver to Tokyo. Because the Japanese market resembles the state of the US market a few years ago, Valeski said the Gnip team has been able to identify many of the same patterns and roll out similar strategies as it did in the US. But even in the US, it took some time for a social-based product like Gnip to gain traction especially in institutionalized industries like finance.
“Using new media or something that is conceivably public social interactions to base financial decisions on, it can come off a little strange; but intuitively, it makes sense because the finance industry, at the root, is based on public opinion,” Valeski said. “There’s enough social conversation happening publically now that people can build algorithms around the value of something based on how people are talking about it. You can start driving real decisions based on that social consciousness for the first time in history.”
As Gnip is using social data in groundbreaking ways, it is continuing to blaze the enterprise-facing software trail like many other Boulder digital startups today are. And although they’ve made quite a bit of adjustment in their short six-year history, Valeski said the Gnip team has kept its inherently “Boulder” culture intact by valuing honesty, transparency and trust.
“We pride ourselves on solving interesting problems, always pushing ourselves and little, if any, compromise -- and all of that is a reflection of the Boulder area to me,” Valeski said. “I grew up here and have lived that my whole life. In a lot of ways, Gnip feels a lot like a corporate embodiment of that.”
