We’re excited to announce that two new executives have joined the Iterable leadership team: finance veteran Will Johnson as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and cybersecurity expert Andrew Becherer as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).
This news comes at the heels of last week’s announcement that we closed a $60 million Series D round. To build on this tremendous momentum, Will and Andrew will play key roles in helping Iterable continue our global expansion, enhance our service offerings and further transform the growth marketing space.
About Our Leadership Additions
Will brings more than 25 years of venture capital and emerging technology experience to the Iterable team, having held leadership positions at Workday, DemandTec, GuideSpark and more. The operational expertise that Will brings from a career in startup ventures, as well as billion-dollar public companies, will provide additional strategic leadership to continue optimizing Iterable’s business and growth objectives of the future.
Andrew is a security practitioner with nearly 20 years of technology, computing and risk experience. Prior to joining Iterable, Andrew served as the Chief Security Officer at Datadog where he built the program that secured their operations during their rise of rapid growth that ultimately resulted in a successful 2019 IPO. As CISO, Andrew will guide company growth, scale and acceleration into more highly regulated markets.
We asked these executives to share in their own words why they joined the team, how they describe their philosophies about finance and security, respectively, and what they’re focused on in 2020.
Will Johnson, CFO: All Aboard the Iterable Train
I was thrilled to join Iterable earlier this fall as the company’s first Chief Financial Officer. The need for a CFO at this stage is really a testament to how far the company has come in the last few years.
Iterable has experienced rapid growth across a whole number of dimensions—revenue, customers, employees, offices and funding. With our eye on triple-digit growth in the near term, we are now undertaking a natural evolution in terms of scaling our internal infrastructure, strategic planning capabilities, and—most importantly—the team that enables these components.
The metaphor I like to use is that of the Iterable freight train barreling down the track at a fairly high rate of speed. As a strategic CFO, I believe my role is to partner with the leadership team to chart a course for the business—and then to lay the infrastructure ahead of the train such that it never runs off the track.
But the balance we aim to strike is to avoid building the track too far ahead of the train, such that we are continually being good stewards of our financial resources. We also want to allow for a path that has the freedom to tweak our course along the way.
As Iterable employees, we are all helping power the train down the track. But in another sense, we are all passengers on this journey—particularly as it relates to the Iterable culture. Each of us has the responsibility to embody our values, helping to ensure that our fellow passengers have the best experience possible.
One of the deciding factors in my joining Iterable was the extent to which our team lives its values. I’ve seen businesses with similarly strong growth to ours, or are great places to work—but it’s the combination of both that makes the Iterable opportunity relatively rare in today’s world.
Our recent Series D financing provides us the necessary growth capital to fuel Iterable for years to come, and I couldn’t be more excited to be joining at this stage of the journey. I look forward to helping Iterable make its enduring mark as a business that uniquely allows customers to connect people with the products that bring them joy.
Andrew Becherer, CISO: It’s All About the People
Like Will stated, everything about Iterable’s growth and trajectory excited me, and I knew when I joined as Chief Information Security Officer that I had found the right place for the next stage of my career. I love building things, whether it’s tinkering on robots or participating in hackathons, so Iterable offered a unique opportunity to develop a robust security program that’s self-sufficient and scalable to the business’s hyper-growth.
Many often misconstrue a CISO’s job as being all about technology, but it’s actually all about people. As a security specialist, my priority going into 2020 is to educate, guide and level up our workforce with best practices that will further the company’s growth and enable Iterable to enter more highly regulated markets.
Security is a facet of the quality that a business delivers and most software development organizations have realized that they cannot rely on designated quality professionals alone to keep that bar high. In 2020, I hope to drive the adoption of a security mindset so all employees embrace their obligations to the task.
Another 2020 resolution is to help employees understand the difference between security and privacy: They are commonly considered as one and the same, but while they are indeed interrelated, they are distinct from one another.
Security is merely a set of technical guarantees that something will or will not happen, such as someone won’t be able to log into your account; privacy, on the other hand, deals with how a business handles customer data. Security is the foundation of privacy practices, but it’s not enough to provide privacy.
With GDPR and CCPA at top of mind for consumer brands right now, the privacy issues that Iterable and our customers face are constantly evolving. I don’t believe an organization can operate at the highest levels of safety and trustworthiness until they intuitively understand how these two concepts are different and how they rely upon each other.
Will and I have already hit the ground running, and we can’t wait for what’s in store for the entire Iterable community next year. I want to thank everyone on the team for the warm welcome, and I’m looking forward to what’s ahead!
Come Join the Iterable Team
With Will and Andrew on board, we’re dedicated to accelerating our growth even further in 2020, so if you’re interested in being a part of an amazing company that is consistently ranked as one of the best places to work, then check out our careers page.
We’re hiring across all departments and across each of our four offices in San Francisco, New York City, Denver and London—so come join us!
