Nick Halstead is the entrepreneur behind Tweetmeme and Datasift. Today he announced that he will be standing down from the role of CEO, to be replaced by Rob Bailey who he has been working with for some time.
Congratulations Nick. More founders should do this the right way.
Nick Halstead, Robert Scoble
Not only for creating and playing a huge, huge role in building a company that is making sense of the vast amount on information that streams from the Twitter fire hose. Datasift simply would not exist without you. More than that though, by recognising what you love, and what you don’t, you are giving your baby an even greater chance of growing up. I have seen so many businesses with great potential prevented from reaching their potential because the founders insist they are always going to be the best people to be the CEO.
“The last four years have been without doubt the most challenging of my life. To have a vision and a desire to bring about that vision through technology has been filled with many thousands of tasks which I have at times frankly not enjoyed. I have written before that programmers hate ‘non-solving’ tasks – as programmers enjoy problem solving tasks and preferably complex and interesting tasks. Running a business is not like programming, it is a multitude of disciplines involving operations, sales, marketing, finance and HR, and most importantly it involves dealing with people. These skills IMHO in the most part are not skills that programmers have or wish to have (and I count myself as one of them).” Nick’s blog.
Recognising what you like and what you want takes guts, vision and courage. I wish you every success in a role that you clearly love. The world needs more founders like you.