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November 1, 2007

Management changes at Powerset

In this posting, I want to talk about some significant management changes at Powerset. The main changes are:

Let me give you some historical context. When I first had the idea for Powerset and was looking to build my initial management team, I knew that as a first-time CEO my strengths were around the technology and vision and not necessarily around management of a large organization. I sought out a strong operating partner to share many of the C-level responsibilities while letting me do the things I was great at. And that's how I found Steve Newcomb, who became my cofounder and our COO. This partnership worked well during the formation and rapid growth of the company. While I focused on the strategy around Powerset’s vision and technology and connecting Powerset with the outside world, Steve lead the company internally and brought strengths in execution on several other fronts. We can all be proud of what we accomplished during Powerset’s early days but with the company’s very rapid growth and the team’s great progress, we knew it was time to re-evaluate.

After extensive thought and reflection, the Board and management team decided that the time was right for us to bring in a new CEO to take the company to the next level and for me to transition into the role of CTO. The Board evaluated what this change would mean for Steve, and concluded that bringing in a world-class CEO who is a strong operational manager would make the COO role redundant. By helping us get to this point, Steve did the job he signed up for and he has now left the company. As many of you know, Steve has been a strong force for the company and a key part of what made Powerset an early success. He has also been a champion and protector of our corporate culture. These influences are now part of our DNA and we will continue to invest in and protect the inspirational culture that Steve helped to build. Steve will remain a friend of the company and a major shareholder and maintains the best wishes for the success of Powerset and the team. He has personal passions in some new directions which he will no doubt be writing about on his blog.

I consider this kind of deliberate reflection in order to make the best choices for the company a strong testament to Powerset’s management team. The result is truly what we all think is the best path for the company going forward. Bringing in a new world-class CEO will help the company grow and take advantage of the great opportunity ahead of us. I am proud of what we accomplished to get the company this far, and I really look forward to working and learning from a great CEO during our next stage of growth. And, as a major shareholder in the company, I see this transition as something that will result in great long term value for the company.

While I enjoyed being CEO during the initial growth phase of the company, pulling together the early team and investors, and defining the vision and core strategy for the company, I believe the CTO role at this point plays to my best strengths and my passion. It also makes it easier for me to contribute ideas and technical solutions without people taking them as directives from the CEO. This was not obvious when I decided to be CEO during the earlier growth of the company and in this sense it makes it easier and more appropriate for me to be part of the creative team. As Founder and CTO, I will also continue as the technology visionary and evangelist for Powerset to the outside world. Ron Kaplan, who has been our CTO and Chief Science Officer, will transition fully to the CSO title. This also gives Ron more time to guide the core science at the heart of Powerset's differentiation.

We have recently kicked off a search to find the right CEO. We have already talked with some excellent candidates and are confident that we will bring in someone of up to Powerset’s level of quality. If you are or know someone who could be a great CEO for a company with Powerset's vision and visibility, I would love to talk with you.

So that's the background for the current changes. With that, I want to give some perspective on the development of startup companies, which may be useful for other early management teams facing similar stages of growth. The talents, roles, and personalities that work best for running a company are often different at different stages of the company's growth. Each stage brings with it a challenging transition. Powerset is unusual only in the reflection and cooperation that the management team has demonstrated in making the right changes to propel the company through the next stages of growth.

In thinking about these changes, it is an interesting point for reflection about where Powerset is now and where we are going. It has been a little over two years since we incorporated the company and just one year since we raised Series A funding. What was largely a potential back then has become much more of a reality now. One year ago we had only a prototype, didn't have a license or source code to our core technology, had a small team in general and no search team at all and people were asking why natural language might matter for search, wasn't this impossible and hadn't it already failed. Today, all of that has changed in ways that are beyond what anyone might have expected.

The changes we are making now position us for a next phase that promises to be really exciting. We will bring our technology out in real products that users will enjoy and that will trigger changes across the entire ecosystem of search. I think the next year is going to be an amazing time for Powerset and I am as passionate as ever about Powerset, our technology, our team and our future.

Posted by barney at November 1, 2007 10:51 PM

This entry was posted in the following categories: Powerset

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