The concept of “rocks” is inspired by the rocks, pebbles, and technique for prioritization. Essentially, if you fill your glass with sand and pebbles, you don’t have room for the big rocks.
We define rocks as the critical things we prioritize (at the expense of other things) because they are so important. Each quarter, our leadership team gets together to identify 5-10 important things that must get done across the business. In the spirit of clarity, we write a sentence for each goal: “We will know this is done when ____________.”
A single person on the leadership team is accountable for each rock. While there is plenty of good debate about responsibility vs accountability, we prefer accountability in this context. Essentially, if you “own” a particular rock or metric, you are making a pledge to your colleagues that you will do what it takes (including asking for help, delegating key tasks, making hard trade-offs, etc) to get it done.
Q2 2026 Rocks
For this quarter we’re focused on the following major initiatives (as well as plenty of pebbles and sand). Please note, we’ve slightly sanitized these for public consumption.
Design Win Partners Formally Engaged (Manish)
We will know this is done when 2–3 design win partners are formally engaged with a defined use case, have access to Datum infrastructure, an active technical relationship in progress, and we have presented to 10+ qualified prospects to build the pipeline.
Performance Benchmarks Published (Drew)
We will know this is done when each core Datum product (AI Edge, Inference, Compute, Galactic VPC) has a publicly accessible benchmark or test harness showing measurable performance and/or cost advantages versus a named alternative — with reproducible methodology, real numbers, and a place to find them (docs, blog post, or benchmark page).
Datum Compute Live (Drew)
We will know this is done when Datum Compute is live in production with real users running workloads, as defined by the acceptance criteria in #682.
AI Services Layer Live (Zac)
We will know this is done when AI Edge (with top Built-on-Envoy extensions) and Agent Router are both live and accessible to users, as defined in #610.
Galactic VPC Live (Drew)
We will know this is done when Galactic VPC is live in production and users can provision and operate a VPC, as defined in #594.
Hardware & Backbone Ready (Drew)
We will know this is done when Datum’s new hardware stack and expanded global network backbone are deployed, operational, and capable of authentically supporting design win partner workloads.
Alt Cloud Accelerator Launched (Jacob)
We will know this is done when the partners are secured, the program is publicly announced, the application process is live, and the first cohort of applicants can apply.
Developer Pipeline Activated (Jacob)
We will know this is done when Datum has meaningfully grown top-of-funnel developer mindshare across key communities, measured by 500+ new users on the platform.
Previous Rocks
For context and history buffs, here are the rocks we worked on during Q1 2026:
- AI CDN Started with Roadmap (Zac)
- One “design win” partner committed (Manish)
- Hire and onboard the right engineers in Q1 (Drew)
- Datum Cloud is live with 100+ active users (Drew)
- Updated platform and product vision (Jacob)
- Features & use cases in website and decks (Jacob)
- Trust Center ready for implementation (Steve)