Girish Mathrubootham's Freshworks faces its first big painful change as a listed company as CEO Woodside pares the founder's extended family in reorg for the future
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What comes to your mind when you think of steps an incoming CEO will take in a company, in articulating and implementing a longer-term plan? Acquisitions and layoffs would probably be easy guesses. Dennis Woodside at Freshworks has now done both, part of a broader reorientation of the company as he attempts to make it a leaner software outfit.
This is driven both by current market conditions and what Woodside sees as strategic opportunities in taking Freshworks to its next big target of a billion dollars in revenue. Profitably.
The new Freshworks is distinctly one run by a professional CEO. Founder Girish Mathrubootham’s beloved Freshworks ‘kudumba’ (family, or extended family and community in his native tongue Tamil) has given way to the harsh realities of capitalism. Especially, US-style capitalism, where even solid beats of expectations delivered by the biggest tech companies like Microsoft and Nvidia aren’t enough.
The acquisition of Device42, Freshworks’s first major purchase since its listing, was reported to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 30. The company announced its completion in June – on Woodside’s watch as the new CEO. The deal was valued at $230 million, according to the company’s filing with the SEC.
That is roughly 21-times the $11 million in revenue from Device42 that CFO Tyler Sloat expects in 2024, based on his comments to analysts.