Founder of Quiet Riots
United Kingdom
- Current
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- Founder at Quiet Riots
- Past
- Education
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- Chartered Institute of Management Accountants
- University of Cambridge
- Connections
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397
connections
- Industry
- Internet
- Websites
Simon Darling’s Experience
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Founder
Quiet Riots
(Internet industry)
January 2008 — Present (1 year 11 months)
Quiet Riots enables people to change things by grouping up. It addresses a problem on the internet today where there isn't a platform to share issues about organisations and get their attention.
The service launched in prototype in October 2009 and has a team preparing for a full launch in 2010 incorporating early user feedback.
Developed web service from concept into a live service. Amazed at number of lessons learnt doing it first hand even though worked in internet-related businesses for more than 10 years.
Managed a remote technical development team using agile development.
Learnt first hand the challenge of designing great user experiences online.
Recruited and managed a small team of developers, community management and design. -
VP Marketing
Skype
(Privately Held; Telecommunications industry)
2007 — 2007 (less than a year)
Reorganised entire marketing team. Brought in to reorganise the team of 25 people to coordinate marketing activities with more focused objectives and metrics and more strategic integration with the rest of the business.
Integrated marketing across all marketing channels including PR, online, onsite, offline, email, social media, brand and design
Led all marketing activities worldwide with campaigns in more than 20 languages with a localisation team to support it. Fascinating having centralised marketing across so many territories with lots of learnings.
Responsible for customer support. Oversaw a well run 50 person customer support team in Estonia.
Launched 3 Skypephone in partnership with the mobile operator 3 in Italy, UK, Denmark, Hong Kong
Member of the Skype Management Team which included 6 months with Niklas Zennstrom as CEO and then Michael van Swaaij as CEO from eBay. Involved in strategic decision making and seeing first hand product development between large engineering team in Estonia and London-based business development team. Lots of learnings. -
Managing Director
Headingford
(Internet industry)
July 2006 — December 2007 (1 year 6 months)
Set up consultancy whilst I figured whether I wanted to start a new venture or join another company. Had enjoyed time at eBay, was ready to move on to new things, had one idea wanted to explore and decided to take time to have a look around.
Did consulting projects that ranged from a day or two to a few months with clients (or clients of companies I subcontracted via) that included Tesco, Microsoft, Joost, Warner Music, Skype.
Consulting on marketing leadership when integrated old and new channels, building customer-centric marketing infrastructure and leadership development. -
Customer Development Director
eBay UK
(Public Company; eBay; Internet industry)
September 2005 — July 2006 (11 months)
Led a multi-functional team with responsibility for:
• strategic development: 2 person team delivering integrated cross-functional strategic plans
• customer strategy, planning and implementation: 9 person team servicing 10 million+ user base, developing detailed segment-specific plan across product, marketing, customer support
• revenue, expense and resource allocation across comms, product and CS
• Insight: an 8 person team of research and data analysts mining customer data.
• Motors business: a 4 person team growing the business to more than 600,000 vehicles traded
- Culture change and people development: strong personal interest in change leadership and culture; ed eBay UK’s Great Place To Work initiative with UK team regularly scoring highly on a number of satisfaction measures
- UK Management Team member including restructuring of entire UK team
- Global projects: leader and participant in global team (eg segmentation, brand, marketing leadership) -
Marketing Director
eBay UK
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; ebay; Internet industry)
October 2002 — September 2005 (3 years )
Marketing Director (Aug 03–Sep 05); Head of Internet Marketing (Feb 03–Jul 03); Consultant (Oct 02-Jan 03)
• Leadership: built team from 8 to 30 with marketing budget grown from humble origins to in excess of £10m with business objectives of acquisition and growing share of wallet of existing user base. User base grown from 4 million to in excess of 10 million.
• Brand & marketing strategy
• Internet marketing: built IM team from 4 to 8 providing highly cost effective CPA through search marketing, affiliate marketing and portal marketing.
• E-mail & Onsite marketing: lead development of behavioural segmentation on 10m+ user base; campaign management; partnership with dunnhumby
• Offline marketing: selected eBay UK’s first creative agency for launch of Oct 04 TV campaign; selecting media agency
• PR: challenge is to prioritise PR activity to focus on strategic marketing priorities; hired Head of PR from leading consumer PR agency with strong strategic planning skills -
European Business Development Director
Bolt
(Privately Held; Online Media industry)
February 2001 — February 2002 (1 year 1 month)
Bolt was a venture-capital backed, US incorporated, web and mobile youth communications platform service. Responsible for selling Bolt’s white label community management solutions into the major European telecom operators, handset manufacturers, their portals and media companies.
• Established high level contact in target clients
• Presented a compelling sales pitch whilst the product offering was often ill-defined and not certain to be built.
• Additional learning at Bolt included experiencing the cultural challenge of moving a web-centric, US-based organisation to becoming one with integrated web-mobile products sensitive to the differences of the European marketplace. Experienced rounds of staff layoffs reducing team from 180 to 50
Bolt was a venture-capital backed, US incorporated, web and mobile youth communications platform service. Responsible for selling Bolt’s white label community management solutions into the major European telecom operators, handset manufacturers, their portals and media companies.
• Established high level contact in target clients
• Presented a compelling sales pitch whilst the product offering was often ill-defined and not certain to be built.
• Additional learning at Bolt included experiencing the cultural challenge of moving a web-centric, US-based organisation to becoming one with integrated web-mobile products sensitive to the differences of the European marketplace. Experienced rounds of staff layoffs reducing team from 180 to 50
• Ultimately the European office was closed and was given redundancy and then the whole business folded. -
Founder and Sales & Marketing Director
Fonepark
(Telecommunications industry)
January 2000 — February 2001 (1 year 2 months)
Founded and sold the business. It was a text messaging services business selling solutions to mobile operators.
• Raised seed investment capital. Gained experience of detailed investor term sheets.
• Hired a team of 9 young, relatively inexpensive, inexperienced staff that with hindsight would have been better composed of fewer, more experienced people.
• Built the first and second versions of the application using an IT development company in Prague saving considerable money compared to equivalent UK resource.
• Sold it for a cash and equity deal to Bolt where the founders were retained as full-time employees -
Interactive Marketing Manager
Unilever
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Consumer Goods industry)
December 1995 — December 1998 (3 years 1 month)
Wrote a job description whilst working in Lever Europe in 1995 and sent it to Senior Managers in Unilever Corporate explaining that the internet had huge implications for Unilever and I would like a strategic development role.
• Worked on new media projects including Ragu, Lynx, Domestos, Persil, I Can’t Believe Its Not Butter. Strong network at all levels both inside Unilever in marketing, sales, purchasing and research and outside including WPP and marketing services companies.
• Built a network of internet marketing agitators across the business culminating in the focusing of resource in North American and European Interactive Brand Centres. Two $15m three-year deals were done with AOL and MSN making it at the time “the world’s largest commitment to internet advertising” (CNN, 1998).
• Ran many workshops with regular ratings on feedback forms as ‘inspirational’.
• Rated as ‘Outstanding’ in management appraisal and awarded bonus for meeting ‘stretch’ targets -
Finance Manager
Unilever
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Consumer Goods industry)
September 1993 — November 1995 (2 years 3 months)
Finance Manager, Lever Europe (UK)
Company Financial Reporting Manager (1995) and Home Care Group Assistant Management Accountant (1994/3) working in Jif, Domestos and Dove teams. Completed Unilever’s two year UCMDS training scheme including factory experience, marketing, management and sales training.
Simon Darling’s Education
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Chartered Institute of Management Accountants
CIMA Passed Finalist , 1993 — 1995
Sir Ian Morrow Prize, Strategic Management & Marketing
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University of Cambridge
BA , Economics , 1989 — 1992
First; Scholar, Corpus Christi College
Additional Information
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eBay Employees and Alumni Group -
We Are Social
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