Artico Search Recruits CEO for Pingboard
April 13, 2022 – Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor and Brian Ippolito of Artico Search have placed Laith Dahiyat as the new chief executive officer of Pingboard, an Austin, TX-based software company that helps to increase employee retention and engagement. “Laith’s product-first approach to growth immediately stood out,” said Bill Boebel, Pingboard’s founder. “I was looking for someone who could help us scale, while continuing to deliver an amazing product that customers love.”
Mr. Boebel founded Pingboard in 2013 in response to a need from start-up incubator Capital Factory, which he and Joshua Baer co-founded a few years prior, and its rapidly growing coworking business. Since then, Pingboard has grown to serve more than 750,000 employees across 2,500 businesses worldwide. As the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the remote work trend, the need for Pingboard’s services grew, spurring 15 consecutive months of growth. After the company achieved profitability in 2020, Mr. Boebel began thinking of the right person to lead Pingboard through its next phase of growth. That person is Mr. Dahiyat, a strategic leader with a product-focused SaaS (software as a service) background and a passion for creating highly engaged teams. He most recently served as general manager of Weedmaps, the largest software and data company focusing on the cannabis sector.
Mr. Dahiyat brings more than 20 years of enterprise software and E-commerce experience. Prior to Weedmaps, he served as chief strategy officer of the SaaS billing platform Chargify, expanding the product into event-based billing and overseeing an exit to Battery Ventures last May.
“It’s an honor to be leading one of Austin’s most exciting tech companies in the HR tech space – one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing industries,” said Mr. Dahiyat. “The pandemic accelerated the adoption of software to help People Ops leaders retain and engage their newly remote workforce. The team at Pingboard has been working on some very important developments to further help companies. I can’t wait to showcase what we have coming soon to help build on the company’s success.”
Three Seed Rounds
To date, Pingboard has raised $7.5 million in three seed rounds, most recently in 2018. Investors have included Silverton Partners (Austin), Capital Factory (Austin), Active Capital (San Antonio, TX), and Betaworks (New York), as well as many Austin-based angel investors.
Artico Search Launches to Help Companies Build, Scale and Protect
No one could argue that Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor and Matt Comyns, both of whom recently departed from Caldwell to co-found their own executive search firm, Artico Search, are anything less than ground-breaking search leaders. They are both among the very best in their respective specialties, recruiting some of the most sought after, and costliest, hires in the search industry and building successful practices and teams in their areas of specialty. In joining forces, they are looking to create a powerhouse search brand that reflects their experience, passion, and core values focused on delivering the people to drive change and transformation in the tech industry.
Ms. Chatfield-Taylor’s team focuses on executive-level search for scaleup venture capital and private equity-backed technology companies. The team has deep expertise in global enterprise software, data and consumer internet businesses. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor is deeply passionate about the importance of diversifying the industry, with a full 53 percent of her placements tracked since 2019 being underrepresented executives.
Ms. Chatfield-Taylor co-founded Artico with Matt Comyns, a cybersecurity leadership expert, to lead the firm’s rapidly expanding growth executive search team. Given the billions of dollars flowing into venture capital and private equity investments these days, as well as the ever-present threat of cybersecurity breaches, the founders expect big growth acceleration ahead. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor has completed over 75 CEO searches as well as partner, principal, and other CXO level assignments.
Specializing in management and go to market leaders, and people leadership search, Mr. Ippolito is a partner on Artico’s growth team. Previously, he was a consultant and key member of Caldwell Partner’s private equity and venture capital practice, focused on executive level search for high-growth technology companies.
Related: Artico Search Recruits Chief Revenue Officer for Labster
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
