Milestones and Transitions

Milestones

Mike Driscoll and I founded Metamarkets in 2009 to provide large scale analytics to media companies, and I’m very gratified we have reached our objectives. Over the past 18 months, Metamarkets has built and shipped some of the most scalable, cutting-edge data analytics infrastructure in the marketplace. Our engineering and product teams have designed, built and deployed from scratch a cloud-hosted integrated analytics stack on behalf of market-leading, web-scale media businesses.

As we have pushed into the market, we have seen our product scale to accommodate the biggest, fastest-moving event sets on the internet. The core value proposition for our product has been validated through our customer set: the Metamarkets stack eliminates the need for a business to integrate multiple disparate software solutions at the data ingestion, database, analytics and visualization layers. This is something revolutionary for the data analytics industry.

The speed, scalability and usability advantages of our integrated platform are apparent to our customers. Our goal is to deliver up-to-the-minute, quantitative, operational intelligence about a business’s transaction streams, at a scale previously incomprehensible, at a cost effective price point, and for a broad customer set. In short, it’s been our goal to enable our partners to interact with their critical transaction events data when, where and how they choose; as the first thing they check when they wake up; as the last thing they check before going to sleep. Our mobile and tablet product now enable our customers to analyze their data in the middle of the night.

Without a doubt, our team’s stunning product achievements in 2011 are the accomplishment of which I’m most proud. We have been true to our original vision, and now lead the market for hosted, web-scale Business Intelligence for the global media and advertising industries. Now that Metamarkets has established its offer in an initial set of verticals, we can turn to address the broader emergent market opportunity, one that both Mike and I can honestly state is far larger than our initial conception when we launched the company a couple of years ago.

The Big Swing

Metamarkets sits at the intersection of three megatrends: Big Data, analytics, and cloud computing. We believe this opportunity must be seized quickly and aggressively, and so in 2012, Metamarkets will extend our platform into adjacent, data-intensive verticals whom we know are hungry for our brand of cost-effective, scale analytics.

A world leading company in big data analytics requires appropriate leadership given the specialized technical nature of the opportunity. I’m incredibly grateful and proud to announce that this is the time for Mike Driscoll, my Metamarkets co-founder and CTO, to take over as Metamarkets’ CEO. Mike is a world-class technical talent and rising star in data software, one of the most intensely brilliant technical product minds I’ve encountered in over 15 years of financial and data software work, a colleague whom I’ve had the great good fortune to call co-founder, and with whom I’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder to build a great foundation over the past two years. I have the utmost confidence in Mike’s abilities, vision and instincts to take Metamarkets to the next level (or two, or three). Mike will take our initial vision of a distributed, fast, analytics service, and grow Metamarkets into something far more transformative than anybody could have imagined a couple of years ago.

Transitions

Nurturing and launching a company is very different from scaling one. I have spent three years getting Metamarkets off the ground, the past two in bringing our product into the market. In this time, we’ve built a company and put the foundational product and engineering teams in place. And so the time is right for me to return to my passion: the early stages of product ideation and new venture formation. I’m extremely fortunate to be joining a leading early-stage VC fund as Venture Partner and EIR. I have a number of ideas I am considering, though there is one I am particularly passionate about launching in 2012 – more about my next steps at a later date.

Most importantly, despite stepping away from the CEO’s chair, I will continue to serve actively on Metamarkets’ Board of Directors, and I’ve coordinated with Mike to continue to advise the Metamarkets product and sales teams on their approach to the media and advertising markets. Our current partners and customers will experience no change in their service or interactions with the company. We continue to aim high and service our partners at the same exceptional levels we established in 2011. I’m very much looking forward to helping Metamarkets continue to grow, while also advancing some of my own personal career objectives. The time is right for this transition, and Mike and I have embraced it.

It’s been a great to get Metamarkets out of the garage, moving along local streets, following access roads, and now onto the highway. We can see the wide, fast road ahead, and I for one can feel the car accelerating…

DS

The Road Ahead

When David and I began our start-up journey together in 2009, in a windowless office on Townsend Street, I doubt if either of us could have conceived of the successes (nor of the sleepless nights) that the subsequent years would bring.  We are fortunate to have assembled a team of extraordinary engineers, whose dedicated efforts have yielded a revenue-generating product serving a growing cast of engaged customers.

I am proud of what we have accomplished to date under David’s leadership as CEO.  I look forward to having his unparalleled intellect and instincts at work for us as we move forward.  And I’m humbled by the opportunity to build on his achievements and begin scaling our organization to match the scope of our market opportunity.

To that end, today I am announcing that Ken Chestnut, a former executive at MarkLogic and Siebel Systems, will be joining Metamarkets to lead our marketing efforts.  Ken brings over 15 years of experience in the management, strategy, and marketing of business software tools.  Ken joins Charlene Son Rigby, a former Oracle executive, who leads our sales and operations and joined us two months ago.

Working with our engineering leadership, Ken and Charlene will help us capitalize on our core technology: our in-memory data store, analytics engine, and real-time, interactive dashboard.

As we will describe in an upcoming blog post, we have scaled our cloud-based data and compute infrastructure by a factor of 100 since bringing our first customer onboard over a year ago.  As of last week, we clocked a new performance record: a query that processed 26 billion records in under a second.

It is time for Metamarkets to double-down on our technology, address verticals beyond the digital media markets, and lengthen our lead as a pioneer in big data solutions.

As I shift from my role as CTO, I aim not only to maintain but to strengthen the engineering-driven culture that has gotten us to this stage.

MD