CEO Ian Rogers Clarifies Topspin Story

Taking a break from a family vacation in Hawaii, Topspin CEO Ian Rogers wrote to object to my use of the word pivot (Sorry. Pivot just fit so well with Topspin...) to describe changes at the company and say that while, as today's story suggested, some things are shifting, the company is strong and hiring. Rogers wrote:

Yes, I'm in Hawaii on a long-planned family vacation. If I'd have planned it later I'd have come home a day sooner to be at SF MusicTech today! Seeing all the tweets fly by and I'm bummed I'm missing it.

 We made the decision to close our SF office in June and made the change at the beginning of July. We've been hiring like mad in our Santa Monica office ever since. We have hired 7 people in the past 60 days and have at least 4 open positions currently. Andrew's move is unrelated but adds one more role I need to hire. If you know good people please send them my way (via LinkedIn is probably the best way at the moment). We're on the hunt.

We've had a San Francisco office since before I started at the company in April 2008 (the company was founded by Shamal and Peter in 2007). Our engineering, finance, business development and customer support teams were all SF-based. The reason to be there was for the access to the bay area engineering talent pool, but the downside of being there was having the team using the Topspin app (our industry-facing Creative Services team) in Santa Monica and the team building the app in San Francisco made for an inefficient product development process to say the least. As the years went on, it was clear the benefits of having an SF office weren't outweighing the inefficiencies. It was a really difficult decision but I knew in my heart we'd build a better product if we had everyone under one roof. It's already paying off in spades and you'll see some serious differences in Topspin in the coming months as a result.

No pivot in business model. We're refining the product and our approach, but nothing worthy of "pivot" at the moment. Some very big things coming up but they're on our same trajectory.

Re: the This Week In Music comment — the real work there is done by This Week In Producer Will Thompson. He does all the hard work. I just show up for 45 minutes and talk! He also produces Pensado's Place, which you should check out if you haven't yet. Niche programming FTW!

See everyone back in the office tomorrow morning.

ian