able to focus on as much in his CEO role.”
Success has created new challenges for Gnip the company needs to address, Valeski said. First, there’s the vast increase in the amount of posts, photos, tweets, and check-ins Gnip needs to collect. Gnip also has to deliver that much more data to customers.
“As our customer base grows, so does the amount of data we have to move out the back door to them. As our partnerships with publishers increase in number, which they’ve steadily been doing over the past number of years, the inbound bandwidth and volume requirements are increasing as well,” Valeski said.
Managing that traffic has and will require infrastructure and software upgrades, and that will continue, Valeski said.
Gnip has emerged as one of the leaders in its industry and grown to be one of Colorado’s leading software companies. But the company’s ascent has not always been smooth, and Valeski said he reminded the dozens of employees added over the past three years how far they have come.
Valeski divides Gnip’s five-and-a-half year history into roughly three phases. The first stage was spent trying to understand the new and rapidly evolving social media industry—back when Gnip was incorporated in early 2008, Myspace was valued at $12 billion and beat Facebook in the Alexa rankings.
Gnip spent its early years “trying to figure out what social data meant, and who would consume it, and who would pay for it, and what should the software look like,” Valeski said.
“Nothing had any clarity or definition, and we were flailing around trying to create some clarity and definition,” he said. “There were lots of fits and starts, and lots of failures.”
During that time, Gnip began to see who its customers were and what it needed to deliver to them. So it pivoted away from its initial focus of delivering data from one social media network to another, shed seven of its 12 employees, and co-founder and then-CEO Eric Marcoullier left the company.
The second phase was spent developing a product and building relationships. It culminated in a syndication agreement with Twitter that made Gnip the first company able to sell data collected from the Twitter firehose. Gnip now has access to the archive of every public tweet in Twitter’s history.
The final and current phase has been scaling up as Gnip added customers and formed partnerships with all the major social media platforms. Moody has been instrumental in overseeing that, Valeski said.
Gnip has managed to grow largely on the strength of its own revenue. It has raised a total of $6.6 million with the last round coming in November 2010, according to SEC filings. Foundry Group, SoftTech, and First Round Capital are investors.
