On ushering in a new CEO. Notes from one entrepreneurial soulmate to another.

<html><head></head><body>A Note from Steven Schuurman

Rarely do you make decisions you know will shape the rest of your life.

Even though you fundamentally believe you are making the right choice, there&#x2019;s still a part of you that&apos;s not 100% sure. You&#x2019;re torn between deep rooted emotions &#x2014; loyalty, ambition, a strong sense of responsibility &#x2014; on the one hand, and an equally strong urge to make a change on the other.

This is how I felt when I decided to co-found Elastic. It is also how I felt when I told fellow Elastic founder Shay Banon I decided to step down as CEO of Elastic.

I knew it was coming, but what I didn&#x2019;t know I was going to tell him at 07:30am at Schiphol airport; utterly unprepared. Knowing all too well that the impact of my decision would have an impact of similar magnitude on his life as it would on mine, I shared my decision. The conversation and subsequent series of events that followed I consider exemplary of the deep relationship we both built over the years.

Long story short, I barely had to explain why. Shay understood immediately as we have always been 100% transparent with each other &#x2013; no exceptions. Here is my thinking: in its essence, I feel the time has come for me to hand over the CEO-baton, as Elastic gears up for the next phase in the company&#x2019;s evolution. I have loved every single element of founding, building, nurturing, shaping and tuning all aspects of the company, but feel my job here as CEO is complete. The foundation is ready.

Elastic has the potential to be the world&#x2019;s next great software company, if it&#x2019;s lead by a truly inspiring visionary leader, that is not afraid of making grand, bold moves. That person is none other than my entrepreneurial soulmate, Shay.

Even though I have carried the CEO title since the inception of the company, he has always been my co-pilot. Wherever we steered our phenomenal rocket ship; we decided on its course together.

Today, I am thrilled to announce that Shay has accepted this new challenge, and will be the CEO of Elastic as of May 1st 2017. I will continue to serve on Elastic&#x2019;s Board of Directors in a non-executive capacity and watch closely over the company&#x2019;s success, which I&#x2019;m sure will continue to blow my mind like it&#x2019;s done since the beginning.

I&#x2019;d like to express a very deep and profound thank you to my co-founders Uri Boness and Simon Willnauer; none of what we have built over the past 5 years would have happened without you. An equally special thank you to my insanely talented executive leadership team; you are brilliant to work with and have made building Elastic easier than a walk in the park on a sunny afternoon. The same holds true for my investors and board members: Peter Fenton from Benchmark Capital, Mike Volpi from Index Ventures, the recently deceased and dearly missed Harry Weller from NEA, Harry&#x2019;s successor Chetan Puttagunta, and lastly, my SpringSource co-founder Rod Johnson. Your dedication is a wonderful source of inspiration, I will forever carry with me.

To all other Elastronauts; I am proud to have served as your CEO, you know I love you. Speak soon.

A Note from Shay Banon

Steven, since the start of our company, what I loved in our partnership is that the definition of roles between us was very flexible. We did what is right for the company, with no ego involved. This gave me the opportunity to roam the company and help where needed, a role that went beyond a typical CTO role, and beyond being &#x201C;just&#x201D; product or technology focused.

It&#x2019;s been a truly amazing 5 years. We are humbled by the adoption of our products &#x2014; we&#x2019;re approaching 100 million total downloads &#x2014; and the growth of our community, which now spans 100 countries with 80,000 members. As it&#x2019;s been said before, we wouldn&#x2019;t be here without our entire community, and we&#x2019;re not going anywhere without your help.
I am excited to take the lead and assume the CEO role, navigate our company through its next phase of evolution, and make sure we build a technology company to last. Our strength as a company is our people, our products, our users, and our responsibilities as a leading tech company (a start is the &quot;<a href="/blog/on-immigration-and-diversity">On Immigration and Diversity</a>&quot; post I wrote), and I feel humble and am ready to lead Elastic to its next level.
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The Next Chapter: Shay Banon to Succeed Steven Schuurman as Elastic CEO

<html><head></head><body>When Shay, Uri, Simon and I founded Elasticsearch in 2012, we always knew we were signing up to provide more than &quot;just search&quot; to the market. That it was going to be successful at this scale, we could have never dreamt up.Three years, five more products, 20 million downloads, 170 employees, and over 17,000 Meetup members later, the future is looking very bright. If I just look at the <a href="http://www.elasticon.com/apex/Elastic_ON_Agenda" target="_blank">lineup of customers and users</a> we have at our first user conference, Elastic{ON}, I feel humbled. There&apos;s the Yale Department of Laboratory Medicine talking about how they use Elasticsearch to identify causes and potential cures for cancer, the U.S. Geological Survey uses the ELK Stack to supplement their seismographic data with social media data in order to better assess and react to earthquakes, FICO will show how it uses Elasticsearch to calculate more accurate credit scores, and we&apos;ve even entered the final frontier, with NASA&apos;s Jet Propulsion Lab taking the mainstage on Wednesday morning to tell us how Elasticsearch monitors metrics from the Mars Curiosity rover.All of us at Elasticsearch are blown away each and every day with how developers around the world are putting our products to use. Today, we&apos;re about much more than just search. We&apos;re obsessed with data, and getting insights out of it. We want our users to query their data, drive analytics and make correlations that couldn&apos;t be extracted before, and we&apos;ve built our products to easily scale along as your data volume grows. We believe we have put a suite of products in place that allows users to extract insights out of their data, that they weren&apos;t able to extract before. That alone is more rewarding to us, that many of you will ever know.Mostly driven by the fact that we are now servicing so many more use cases that span way beyond search, we have felt an increasing urge for some time now to rethink our company brand. Elasticsearch is, and will continue to be, the core engine of our product stack, but the company is building and maintaining a suite of solutions that deliver additional functionality beyond Elasticsearch. Because of this, we believe it is time to embrace a new company brand that&apos;s as versatile as our products.And on that note, I am extremely excited to be able to introduce you to our very new brand:<img src="https://api.contentstack.io/v2/assets/575e4d8d3dc542cb38c0ae94/download?uid=blt65915382fe79c804?uid=blt65915382fe79c804">As a growing number of people, including myself, have been referring to us as &quot;Elastic&quot; since the inception of the company anyway, we believe this is actually a very fitting brand name for our us.But there&apos;s more.As users have become more familiar with the versatility of the ELK stack, we have seen many organizations deploy multiple ELK clusters supporting as many different use cases. Whereas this is a wonderful evolutionary process, it does create challenges we haven&apos;t experienced before. We always felt that there was a good chance that this would happen &#x2013; one company running many ELK clusters &#x2013; and have therefore always envisioned ourselves creating a revolutionary product in the form of a centralized management infrastructure. An infrastructural layer with the objective to put operations people in control of their ELK landscape across their business.In order to accelerate this next phase of our company beyond search, we&apos;ve also announced today that we acquired Elasticsearch SaaS provider Found (<a href="https://found.no/" target="_blank">https://found.no/</a>), whose technology will make it possible to manage multiple clusters: through the SaaS solution, and in the near future, also on premise. Shay gives more details around our teams joining forces in <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/welcome-found">his blog post</a>.I&apos;d like to personally thank everyone that&apos;s been with us on our journey so far. It&apos;s been quite a ride, and it&apos;s far from over. For those that want to join us on our adventure, follow us on our new Twitter handle <a href="http://twitter.com/elastic">@elastic</a> and our brand new website <a href="https://www.elastic.co">elastic.co</a> &#x2013; we&apos;ve got a lot more exciting things in store for 2015 and beyond!</body></html>

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The Next Chapter: Shay Banon to Succeed Steven Schuurman as Elastic CEO

Elastic: For - You Know, More Than Search