In Part 1 I covered how we laid the foundations and eventually launched Brandwatch. Let’s now look at the challenges we faced from then onwards…

Stage 3: The Growth, 2010 to 2015

Commercially, it all started to happen. The market caught up with us (we gradually had much less customer education to do), and the product caught up with the need. MRR was growing regularly, we navigated the ‘Great Recession’. We were off, really.

We took on and overcame technical challenge after technical challenge - built up our data pipeline to process tens of millions of documents per day, 24/7/365, scaled our databases and data storage, improved reliability, refined and expanded our data analysis components, grew our user interface into a rich, complex data mining dashboard and made it all near-realtime (new tweets would show up in our users’ dashboards within 12 seconds of being written).

Business-wise, we settled on a regular cycle of: planning for fundraising, securing an investment, spending and growing, optimising it all, then start again, each cycle taking a couple of years. Brandwatch grew in headcount, the Engineering Department passed the 100 mark, we set up offices in the US (mostly commercial) and Europe (where Engineering remained).

All of which led to cultural changes. No point pretending that we maintained the exact same culture as we grew (does any startup actually do?). Culture does change, often for the better, sometimes for the worse - we had a mix of both!

Brighton office, ca2014

The highlights:

  • Still in the early days, customers were asking for many new charts to be added to our dashboard. Matt, who was in charge of developing these charts, rightfully couldn’t fathom writing similar code over and over again, so asked for advice. A bit of brainstorming later and we created the Chart component: a super-flexible way to chart any combinations of 3 metrics, giving awesome customisation power to our end-users. Many years later this was still the most used UI component in the whole of Brandwatch

  • Not taking a simplistic, narrow technical angle when making business decisions

    • Example 1: We boosted our servers with FusionIO (fast SSD) cards to speed up database queries. Yes, scaling horizontally is best, but scaling vertically this way as well was just so much cheaper, at that point. So despite some objections in the team, we went that way. FusionIO eventually floated, then was acquired, and SSDs are now ubiquitous

    • Example 2: We needed Twitter data and after a bit of research found 2 options. One was providing a much better API, it seemed a better technical fit - but strategically that partner was much more of a competitor. So I picked the other option, Gnip, instead and years later Twitter acquired them, which only made our relationship with Twitter stronger

  • Scaling the Engineering team. We evolved into a structure which turned out to be very similar to Spotify’s, although with our own terminology. We put in place one-on-ones, quarterly OKRs, and (separate) performance reviews - the 3 ingredients that John Doerr identified for modern people management, in his later book. Not to say we did all of this perfectly, most definitely not. But it wasn’t by accident that we saw few people leaving

What I wish had been better?

  • That we had encouraged more collaboration at the senior level. For example by carrying on with our weekly leadership meetings. We lost something there, at least for a while

  • That I hadn’t stopped saying No as a result of persistent requests, which were bad advice. Stand for what you believe is right

  • That I had done a lot more about diversity. A growing startup has plentiful opportunities to do important work in this area, we should have, early on

Stage 4: Onto New Adventures, 2015 onwards

By 2014, I had started having niggling thoughts of leaving Brandwatch. I could have left by then, but wasn’t ready to, and booked a 1-month sabbatical for the following summer. We then started on another fundraising cycle, and I realised that then was actually a good time, the right time to leave. I just didn’t look forward to coming back for the next two years, not enough anyway. Mostly, I just wanted to do something different. Variety!

And so I left in October 2015. It was a big, emotional decision. Have I missed Brandwatch since? I mostly remember the great people I was lucky enough to work with, and the sheer amount of awesome work we put in to achieve what seemed impossible. Joe, Steve, Berkan, Matt, Katja, Phil, Julius, Glenn, Seb, Bryan, Naomi, Amy, Ali, Rob, Alex, and many, many others.

Candidly, I don’t really miss ‘marketing’ as an industry - it was never really my thing and often seemed futile. I also don’t miss quite a few frustrations: the micro-agressions about my accent, the insults-as-jokes, the borderline bullying for pushing back against over-promising, doing others’ dirty work, or the strange, not-very-inclusive, right-wing atmosphere near the top. Thankfully this was only a small part of working there.

How best to summarise my time post-Brandwatch? A few highlights:

  • Working with 15+ startups as a ‘fractional CTO’: a great opportunity to see different cultures, products, industries, challenges. Definitely a learning opportunity, and a chance to make a difference hopefully

  • Starting a couple of ‘micro-newsletters’ to share advice on being a Startup CTO and being a … youth football coach. Although the former is on pause for now, the latter is still growing nicely

  • Football indeed! Co-managing a team of boys (including mine), and more recently stepping in as Secretary for our wonderful football club, Withdean Youth FC, helping out 300+ girls and boys enjoy playing football

  • Getting into long-distance running, with a few marathons and an ultra so far, with hopefully more to come

I’ve also had much more time for family, learning, travelling. Life, really.

During that time Brandwatch has continued to grow, notably through acquisitions, to the point of being acquired by Cision earlier this year. No doubt that took another huge amount of hard work, and is very well deserved by everyone who was part of the journey.

Back on a personal note, we pledged to put some of the financial upside to good use by donating half a million pounds to Humanist causes over the next 20 years - with 10 charities helped so far, and counting.

So there you go, that was some journey. It was all about the journey.

Just remember to dance!