I could not be more excited to announce that Dave Raphael, who up until today has been our Chief Product Officer at DNSFilter, has accepted our offer to be DNSFilter’s new COO.
Over a year of working together, it is clear to me that Dave embodies our core values. He strives to be the best every step of the way, and he genuinely cares about our team and our customers. That is made apparent in the respect he has for every single team member, his willingness to help individuals, and his drive to do what is needed.
Dave has said it himself: The role of COO can often be open-ended. While Dave will take on more responsibilities around day-to-day operations, the teams that build our product (from data science to engineering and everything under the hood) will still report to him. For nearly a year and a half he’s steered our product development, and that will continue.
As Dave puts it, “It is the confluence of data and how we take advantage of it that differentiates us.” I’ll let him elaborate on that one: “Our job—everyone at DNSFilter’s job—is to deliver on the promises we make to our customers. In order to deliver a great product that navigates end user privacy, compliance requirements, and overall satisfaction, everything needs to be in sync. That means platform and billing. It means data science and business operations. All of these teams, even ones that only impact customers in the most indirect of ways, help us achieve our goal of delivering on our promise to our customers. That’s what being a data-driven organization is. While there is still work to be done, I can confidently say that we are on the right track.”
To me, this is what enabling product-led growth is all about. Without a strong data-driven motion, you are simply making guesses without any real science.
The culture we have created here at DNSFilter has been important to me since day one. Unifying all of these business units is part of the transparency and collaboration I have always strived for. Dave moving into this role is an extension of that core belief. And at the center of it all is our product offering.
Customers use DNSFilter to make their IT environments more secure, gain visibility into their domain traffic, and uncover trends unique to their network instances. We will continue to maximize what our customers can achieve with our product, and we cannot wait to see how Dave influences the future of DNSFilter in his new role.