Nick Halstead is the Founder of DataSift Inc., the real-time social media data-filtering platform. During the past five years, Nick has been a foremost technical visionary on the power of social data to revolutionize information delivery. Nick founded TweetMeme, the leading platform delivering social news, which quickly built an audience of millions in 30 countries. TweetMeme also invented the highly successful Retweet button, which serves more than 30 billion clicks per month and drives high volumes of traffic for Twitter. Nick is a regular speaker at events such as TechCrunch Disrupt, Le Web, Future of Web Apps, The Next Web and Strata and has spoken at SXSW and FOWA.
Rob Bailey is an experienced entrepreneur with more than a decade of tech executive experience. Rob was previously the Vice President of Business Development for SimpleGeo (acquired by Urban Airship) and eScene Networks (acquired by Inktomi). He was also a business development lead at Yahoo! and USWeb/CKS. Rob is a strategic advisor to SoftTech VC and Akkadian Ventures, and regularly advises start-ups on product, fundraising and strategy. Rob has an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Steven Pease brings an extensive background to DataSift in operational and financial management spanning 20 years. He joins the company from a consulting firm, where he was the acting CFO for over 25 emerging technology companies in a wide range of industries, most notably SaaS. Steven has guided his companies in generating substantial growth, the financing of more than $50M in debt and equity, and through several successful exits. He also has general management experience, having run a $40M retail manufacturing company. Earlier in his career, Steven was the Controller for pets.com, a poster company for the original dot.com boom.
Tim serves as Chief Product Officer, focusing on product and market strategy. Tim joins with 20+ years experience in the Enterprise Software market, spanning CRM, collaboration and content management. Tim, joined DataSift from Salesforce where he served as VP Marketing EMEA. He has founded 3 successful startups, most recently Koral, a content collaboration startup which was acquired by Salesforce in 2007.
Pier leads DataSift’s worldwide sales team, focused on growing the company’s business globally. As a SaaS pioneer, Pier brings 15+ years of international sales experience from companies such as Adaytum, Cognos, Business Objects, Right90, and, most recently Steelwedge. Throughout his career he has focused on rapid market and revenue growth, helping Adaytum grow from $1m to $64m, SAP Business Objects grow its EPM revenues by 82% year on year, IBM Cognos double its revenues in once of its top performing regions.
Ming Wu is a seasoned professional with over 12 years of experience spanning technology, solutions and pre-sales. Prior to DataSift, Ming was a Principal Software Consultant at BMC Software and led cloud computing and service automation practice engagements with key strategic partners. Ming has held numerous technology roles across product management, development and operations. Most notably, Ming was VP of Operations at Right90, a Software-as-a-Service provider. Ming has an in-depth knowledge of technology and customer value realization and holds a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lorenzo Alberton introduced solid development, QA, deployment, communication and monitoring processes into an early-stage DataSift, transforming and growing the engineering department and designing and implementing many critical components of the platform. A highly skilled Software Engineer, his expertise lies in large-scale software architectures, low-latency platforms, machine learning, databases, efficient algorithms and data structures, topics he often talks about at international conferences. For the past 10 years Lorenzo has been working with large enterprise companies in Italy, US and UK, in high-visibility projects affecting millions of users in different domains, from Television and Communication (BBC, Channel 5, Cable & Wireless, Dennis Publishing), to Finance and Betting (Ladbrokes, Betfair, Interactive Investor), Manufacturing and Internet Security (AVG).
Andrew Jackson brings over 20 years experience of working with and growing engineering teams. Andrew joins the company from Centrix Software, where he built the engineering team and architected their award winning product portfolio from scratch. Prior to Centrix, Andrew held key technical positions at software and hardware companies including Rockwell Collins and Media Logic where he developed innovative solutions for Windows, Linux and embedded systems platforms.
