SocialText Looks For New CEO

Who’s up for the job?

I do think that’s the right way to do it, but is Technorati the universal foil or example of how not to do things? They seem to make appearance after appearance here in that role. I’m starting to wonder if they do anything right.

I like the link through CrunchBase by the way, much better than going searching through whois and About Us pages, it’s a cool resource.

Can’t help but wonder if Ross already asked Loic Le Meur. I don’t think Le Meur would accept, but this is the first thing that popped into my mind.

I’ve never met Ross, but have read a ton of his posts and comments on the Enterprise landscape. The way SocialText/Ross is going about this, makes me respect them on a whole new level. Hats off to them, and finding an awesome CEO.

-jlb

You know… You can find alot of dishonest people in the U.S. First, there was Enron executives, Worldcom, Tyco, katrina aiding workers, Google ad frauds, etc… These people know how to scam and grab millions of dollars.

Socialtext have to be careful how they hire next CEO.

To quote from his blog post:

I’m going to transition to Chairman & President and focus on growing the top line with my external facing duties and drive corporate and product strategy. CEO 2.0 will bring a strong operations background and have a mandate to grow the bottom line. This is a dream job.
— end quote

Isn’t a CEO supposed to be “external facing”, “focus on growing the top line” and “drive corporate and product strategy”? Isn’t a COO or President supposed to have a “strong operations background”?

I respect Ross, but I cannot imagine a top tier candidate agreeing to this job description. Make up your mind Ross, do you want a COO or a CEO? It sounds like what you really want is a COO/President, while you remain Chairman & CEO. Nothing wrong with that, but it helps to be clear on what you want.

“next level” = step 1

all these euphanisms

Thanks for the encouraging words about the approach we’re taking.

VentureDude (and I love how you are from Wikipedia), there are a lot kinds of CEOs and a lot of ways to organize. I decidedly don’t want to be the COO as the role would outgrow me over the next year. Any incoming CEO would want me in the role I’ve just described. I stand by my words that this is a dream job.

Of course, the CEO will have some external facing duties, and will carry the fiduciary duties the role entails. What I want is to play the most valuable role I can in a company at each stage of its development. I’m proud of my accomplishments and will work hard on my next ones.

Ross, no offense intended. You have done an awesome job! But the job description you have put out is more than a little confusing. It looks like I wasn’t the only one who thought that …

I agree there are all kinds of corporate arrangements - wasn’t Jobs an interim CEO for a long while and Ellison did kick his CFO upstairs as Chairman of the Board, promoting a direct report to be his new putative boss - but the reason they stick out is they are so unusual.

Let’s just say I am vaguely affiliated with Wikis

one more shot at techno….nice…!

Dear VagueDude,

Everybody is vaguely affiliated with wikis, thanks to us and others, and that’s what makes it such a large opportunity. But otherwise, I encourage you to stand by your words.

Ross

I do not usually pick because I am pretty bad at this stuff myself, however I think that the word you mean is complement not compliment. For example, see:
http://www.bigringwriting.com/id29.htm

Thanks, Richard. If this was a wiki, you could have edited the correction.

SocialText blew their early lead and have been trounced by both JotSpot and Atlassian. They are the company most associated with wiki’s but they are by far not the best wiki company.

Does the 3000 customers include the open source downloads?

richard, good catch. wrote too quickly.

#14, we are the best wiki company. Tell me why we you think we are not. Who knows, may be I’ll learn something. And, no, we don’t count open source downloads as customers.

Well, you’ve only had a total of 2,400 open source downloads of your wiki since you released the source (1 year ago). Of this “3000″ how many of them are enterprise and how many are the low end hosted option? I’m genuinely curious.

Furthermore, not to rebuff you Ross, as I’m often want to do, especially with Socialtext’s whole: “we’re open source”, “we’re not open source”, then again recently I see you are calling yourselves open source, but I think if anyone takes an honest look at Atlassian’s customers and MindTouch’s burgeoning platform and rapid user growth they’re gong to agree that Socialtext is not #1 anymore. Although, it’s clear you, yes specifically you, Ross have paved the way for all of us. Thanks for this.

Best of luck in the search.

AaronF:

Actually, there have been around 9K downloads of our source code for Socialtext Open in the past year. I won’t quibble with you about who is “#1″. I just want to correct your inaccurate statement about the downloads of source code.

Also, about your vague accusations about using the words “open source” — Yes, we agreed as a company that we cannot call our code truly open source until it is under an OSI-approved license. We’re working on that. In the meantime, keep in mind that many of our developers are active participants and contributors to open source projects, and Socialtext supports them in that.

Look at your download stats Liz. That’s not your wiki. Those were other projects like Bricklin’s wonderful Wikicalc.

Socialtext devs are wonderful! You guys have contributed to many projects. No doubt. So has Google. Moreover, you guys have done _lots_ to foster the use of open standards.

I was only referring to Ross stating Socialtext is open source in several comments after Ross’ blog post about not being open source.

Sorry Liz. I was wrong. 7,261 is Socialtext open wiki dls. Seriously, apologies.

Five years is a long time, especially after wading through the down-turn.