When is the right time to bring in a CEO? This āFounderās Dilemmaā is something Iāve been considering for some time. After leading product development for Cypress and steering the company through two rounds of funding, eventually I realized trying to split my time between CEO and development duties was no longer feasible. Being merely an āadequateā CEO hampered our potential and my passion and vision has always belonged with building the product. I realized weād reached the point where we needed a dedicated CEO.
Today, Iām delighted to introduce Drew Lanham - our new CEO. Drew comes with over twenty years of experience as a founder and technology executive. In this time, heās worked in AI, speech recognition, enterprise software, consumer internet, and mobility technology markets. Prior to Cypress, he founded and led the media and entertainment business unit at Nexidia, the Connected Life business unit at Yahoo, and co-founded Encompass, which was sold to Yahoo. Drew brings a wealth of knowledge and experience having gone through four acquisitions.
As the founder and creator of Cypress, Iāve nurtured and watched it evolve over the last four years. Itās gone from crazy idea, to late night side-project, to bootstrapped fledgling, to hiring full time employees. Today, weāve grown to tens of thousands of users and over 100 million recorded tests. In order to feel comfortable bringing on someone new, it was essential they share in the core beliefs and DNA the company was founded on. This meant demonstrating a deep appreciation for open source software, while also investing heavily to identify and understand the challenges our users face every day. After working with Drew for the last four months, I couldnāt feel more confident and comfortable building a company and culture together, aligned on these principles.
Hiring Drew has finally enabled me to get back to doing what I love most - experimenting, designing, and developing Cypress. Now, more than ever, we have the ability to grow and scale all facets of the company. We have an amazing team Iām so proud of, and I couldnāt be more excited to continue to work with and learn from the community that challenges us to make Cypress better every day.