From President to CEO: Sprout’s next chapter

“You act like a founder.”

In our eight years working together, those were the second-most meaningful words Justyn Howard, Sprout’s co-founder, former CEO and current executive chair, said to me. Knowing that Justyn saw the same passion, vision and resilience of Sprout Social’s founding team was an incredible compliment and fueled my desire to deliver for this team.

The most meaningful? When Justyn shared he wanted me to succeed him as CEO, and that he had the trust and confidence that I was the right person to lead Sprout in our next chapter of growth.

Over the last 14 years, Sprout has achieved some major milestones and there has been plenty to celebrate. But what I love most about Sprout is that we are always looking forward and aim to be better—to deliver more value for our customers, to create more growth for our employees and to lead our industry. We believe in the saying “Better, Better, Never Best”—that our best work is always in front of us.

As I reflect on my transition to becoming Sprout’s CEO, I wanted to share more about how I got here, how we plan to execute against our vision and why I couldn’t be more excited for the future.

Stepping into the CEO role: How I got here

In moments like these, you have a chance to reflect and be grateful for the many things that lead you to where you are.

In my case, it starts with a first-generation immigrant experience and the good fortune of being raised by incredibly hard-working and value-driven parents. With a dad who was a technologist (from working the night shift monitoring servers, to CIO and COO) and a mom who was an early childhood educator who ran a daycare, there was a healthy set of behaviors that were imparted on me. Their style—which was both demanding and supportive—was instrumental in helping me develop into a leader with high expectations and the appreciation that you need to win both the hearts and minds of your team. The unwavering dedication and love from my wife and two daughters (ringing the bell with them at Sprout’s IPO will forever be one of the greatest moments of my life) has rounded out the wonderful support system that has enabled me to do my best work.

From that strong familial foundation, there were a series of choices, hard-work, amazing teammates and mentors, great timing, and luck that brought me to this point.

The most important choice early in my career (more luck than by design) was landing at Salesforce in 2006. Over the next decade, I was afforded some incredible opportunities to take on a variety of new roles, open new offices and run newly acquired products—all while getting to watch and learn from Marc Benioff and a legion of amazing leaders along the way.

In early 2016, I got a call from Justyn to meet for dinner, where I learned that we lived in the same neighborhood, our kids played at the same park, we were both SaaS nerds who were wildly focused on winning, and our personalities and skill sets were a perfect complement for each other. That dinner changed my life.

As I learned more about the culture at Sprout and the amazing product they had built, I started to see the same incredible attributes that I had witnessed in the early days of Salesforce. A company that aimed to be the best place to be an employee and best place to be a customer, a belief that the best salesperson was the product itself, a bold vision to revolutionize their respective industries while creating a new category, and an enormous set of customer needs that were not properly being served.

It was clear to me that I would always regret not joining the Sprout team. So I made the move.

In the months and years that followed, Justyn and I partnered to scale Sprout from a startup with less than $30 million in annual revenue to a publicly traded company exceeding $385 million. We achieved that by fostering a high-performance culture, with the #1 best product in software and an outstanding team.

Over the last eight years, Justyn has been generous with opportunities and I have been able to support him with fundraising, acquisitions, executive recruiting, board recruiting, an IPO, 19 earnings calls and so much more! Our complementary strengths empowered us to get here, and will propel us as we move forward.

Bringing our vision to life

The most critical thing I learned during my time as Sprout’s President was the importance of focus. Focus is what has gotten us to where we are today, and it’s an area where many of our competitors have faltered. Since the beginning, Sprout has stayed laser focused on social media and the opportunities it presents to every brand and industry. Social and social insights can catapult businesses to the top of their field, and Sprout is the partner they need to harness the power of it.

With our focus on social as sharp as ever, I plan to prioritize these three key areas as CEO:

• Continuing to strengthen our team and culture: We’re honored to be featured on many best places to work lists, but I believe that this accolade is something we have to earn every single day. Building a winning culture is an ever-evolving journey, so we have to be willing to evolve ourselves. That means we need to seek out and celebrate change, find and recruit the absolute best talent, and enthusiastically commit to coaching our team to achieve their greatest potential. I have been deeply focused on building out our Executive Leadership Team, or ELT (I affectionately refer to them as our Sprout Avengers) and I am thrilled to have an exceptional group of people who are experts in their functional areas and are deeply committed to this mission.
• Delivering more customer joy: Our customers are our Why. We are the #1 product in software because we have built excellent software and deliver experiences that make our customers’ lives easier and better. We know that social is mission critical for brands across every part of the customer lifecycle and they need a partner who is committed to serving them. We intend to continue raising the bar on the quality of our products and the Sprout team that supports them every day. This will show up in the way we deliver innovation and in the deep industry expertise that we offer alongside our products. Our customers bring joy to our work and we will be a joy to work with.
• Turning incremental into incredible: While we have a long precedent of continuous growth and improvement, we know we can still raise our own expectations on the quality and output of our work and can iterate even faster. Innovation, a commitment to excellence and thinking bigger will be hallmarks of Sprout’s next chapter. There will be more focused investments coupled with a new sense of urgency and higher expectations on how we deliver. I am already feeling the momentum as we build out our 2025+ plans and execute against our 2024 goals.

Moving at the speed and scale of social

With more than half the world’s population on social media, it’s clear that it’s become pervasive in our personal and professional lives. It’s the number one channel for news and product discovery, not to mention Gen Z’s top channel for customer support. It’s the voice of culture and it’s supported by trillions of data points that can lead to transformational insights. And it moves at unprecedented speed and scale. Can you imagine any brand being able to survive and thrive without a strategy and trusted platform to manage all of this?

That’s why our opportunities are limitless. We’ve designed a platform that serves every industry (including B2B, B2C and B2B2C), every company size (from small businesses to global enterprises), spans across use cases (i.e., sales, marketing, product, strategy), and is a trusted partner to the likes of Meta, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Google, Salesforce and dozens more. We’ve never deviated from our social media-focused mission because this is an unsolved problem for brands and we are uniquely positioned to solve it. Our relentless focus and expertise in social, combined with our award-winning products and talented team, has us set-up to do extraordinary things. The success and growth of our customers like McDonald’s, Honda, Autodesk, Procter & Gamble, The Department of Energy and Universal Pictures, to name a few, are great examples of this.

As I step into the CEO role, I am more confident than ever in Sprout’s ability to over-deliver for our customers and team while defining our market. It’s going to be an amazing ride and I look forward to keeping you updated as we reach more exciting milestones along the journey.