Simply Measured, the Seattle-based social media analytics startup, is adding some horsepower to the executive offices.
The five-year-old company this week named former ExactTarget executives Sameer Kazi and D.Wayne Poole to the positions of chief executive officer and chief revenue officer, respectively. Adam Schoenfeld, who co-founded the company and served as CEO, will move to the new role of chief strategy officer.
Kazi, who started in the CEO job this week, previously served as senior vice president of global services and support at ExactTarget, the Indianapolis-based marketing software juggernaut that was sold to Salesforce.com for $2.5 billion in 2013. He will remain in the Chicago area, commuting to Seattle each week.
Poole, who lives in Cincinnati and will start Monday, previously served as senior vice president of global operations at ExactTarget. He was hired at ExactTarget as employee number five, helping to grow the company’s sales operation and boosting revenue from zero to $400 million.
Schoenfeld said that the new hires are part of a maturation process at Simply Measured, which now boasts 150 employees and more than 1,000 customers. He said the company wants to grow to more than $100 million in recurring revenue, and be positioned for a possible IPO.
“We felt we really needed to add some guys to the exec team who had experience at that level,” said Schoenfeld. “Sameer and DP have a proven record of growing business from early stage to rapid growth and IPO.”
In terms of next steps, Schoenfeld said that they are trying to build the “de-facto analytics solution for all of marketing.”
Simply Measured has a strong corporate culture with three engaged founders: Schoenfeld, Aviel Ginzburg and Damon Cortesi. Having two top executives based in the Midwest could alter the culture a bit, but Schoenfeld said he’s not overly concerned about it. Both Kazi and Poole are committed to being in Seattle four days per week.
“I think we will be able to maintain the Seattle-centric culture that we have,” he said. “We now have an office in Fayetteville, Arkansas with the acquisition we just made, so our operation is getting a bit more distributed.”
The company purchased social media intelligence platform DataRank earlier this month. That followed the acquisition of Seattle-based InsideSocial in September.
Simply Measured, which has raised $29 million in venture funding, declined to disclose current revenue figures. The company was named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately-held companies earlier this year, coming in at $365 with three-year revenue growth of 1,295 percent. The company’s annual revenues were listed at $12.6 million, according to Inc.
