Mike Isaac

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Social Data Startup Gnip Shuffles Top Ranks, Names New CEO

Gnip Jud Valeski, left, will now be Gnip’s CTO. Moody steps into the CEO role.

Gnip, a startup that resells social data from companies like Twitter and Facebook, announced a change in its executive ranks on Wednesday.

Jud Valeski will now become CTO, while Chris Moody moves into the CEO role. Previously, Valeski was CEO while Moody was COO and president.

“It catches Chris at a moment in time where his understanding of what we need to do next, coupled with years of direct experience executing at Gnip, aligns extremely well with how the business is growing and scaling,” Valeski said in a company blog post. “Similarly on the revenue side, he helped lead his previous company to hundreds of millions of dollars annually.”

The startup is one of a handful of data resellers with full access to Twitter’s “firehose,” the pipe through which Twitter’s hundreds of millions of daily tweets all flow. Gnip sifts through all that and surfaces relevant trends and insights to its clients, which include many in the private business sector, finance, the government and the ad tech industry.

Gnip currently has 70 employees and, as Valeski notes, Moody has experience scaling companies up to include hundreds of people — another part of why Moody got the job.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik