- ClickUp has brought in new executives as it looks to grow and prepare for an eventual IPO.
- The company has poached experienced executives from companies like ServiceNow and Zscaler.
- The new executives are focused on building the sales and go-to-market teams, as well as the employee experience.
Productivity and collaboration startup ClickUp has brought in new executives from competitors like ServiceNow to help it grow and prepare for an eventual IPO.
Will May, previously global VP of sales at Zscaler and a sales leader at AppDynamics before that, will join as chief revenue officer to lead the company’s growing sales teams. From ServiceNow came two executives: Jim Bartolomea, now ClickUp’s new senior VP of people, and Marshall Tyler, ClickUp’s newly minted chief strategy officer.
Additionally, Briana Ings, former product and design exec at Snapdocs, is ClickUp’s new VP of product, and Gaurav Agarwal, former senior VP of growth at Freedom Financial Network, is the new chief growth officer.
ClickUp’s new leadership bench is focused on “creating a predictable, scalable, and efficient revenue engine,” Tommy Wang, ClickUp’s chief business officer, told Insider. He said expanding its executive ranks is a key part of its roadmap to an IPO, which he said could come in two to five years.
“Two years from now we should prepare for an IPO and our business operations will be more science than art,” Wang said.
The news comes about a year after ClickUp raised a $400 million Series C funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global Management. ClickUp CEO and founder Zeb Evans says hiring these new senior leaders is a real priority on how best to reinvest its venture capital cash.
“Of course, we want to bring in exceptional leaders with outstanding skills and experience to lead first-class teams,” Evans told Insider. “We’ve also prioritized hiring people who have lived through hyper-scale growth before because they understand the unique challenges we face as a business and can help us avoid common pitfalls.”
ClickUp is a productivity and collaboration app meant to replace common workplace tools, such as documents, workplace chat, whiteboarding/visual collaboration, and task management, by bringing them all into one app with a unified interface.
The company has signed on notable customers including Netflix, Booking.com, Autodesk, McDonald’s, Papa John’s, Swift Transportation, Zynga, and professional sports franchises such as the San Diego Padres. Wang said there are still many opportunities in the future market, especially among prospective customers where existing suites from major technology companies are lacking.
“Even though there are a lot of tools in this market, we often talk to companies trying to DIY an end-to-end solution with Microsoft Office or Google Workspace,” he said. “However, these implementations are unable to meet the sophisticated needs of many companies and ultimately result in the proliferation of point solutions, leading to silos and disconnected work.”
May, Tyler, and Agarwal, the three leaders focused on sales and strategy, will focus on growing different parts of ClickUp’s go-to-market teams.
May focused on developing a strategy for signing larger enterprise customers. Tyler, meanwhile, will be tasked with developing partners and resellers to create an ecosystem for the ClickUp platform. Agarwal will work on growing ClickUp’s business with individual users or smaller teams, who can sign up for the product on their own, and create an online community around the product.
Will May is ClickUp’s new chief revenue officer
ClickUp
May said she was convinced to join ClickUp because she saw a “once in a million kind of opportunity.” The company grew quickly, but lacked a strategy for signing those big customers that are key to becoming an enterprise software business.
Evans, the founder, said this is part of helping the company reach the next milestones in its growth and maturity as a company — without sacrificing ClickUp’s startup culture.
“At first, we were concerned that having too many leaders might slow down our decision-making process. Speed gave us an advantage, and moving quickly was our top priority,” Evans said. “Now, we’ve reached the point where we need singular owners of our core business areas to help us scale and maximize efficiency.”
Jim Bartolomea is ClickUp’s new senior VP of People
ClickUp
That’s where Bartolomea comes in, the new senior VP of people.
“As the company grows. It’s really hard for a CEO to keep that culture right as it grows beyond 20 people,” Bartolomea said. “I really want to translate that empathy into the employee experience here.”
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