Freshworks Inc., a leading software company empowering businesses to delight their customers and employees, announced the appointment of former NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, as a new independent member of the board of directors. Mr. Nelson is a pioneer in the enterprise SaaS industry having held leadership positions at Oracle, Sun Microsystems, McAfee, and NetSuite.”Zach brings tremendous experience building and scaling high-velocity cloud software companies to the Freshworks board,” said Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshworks. “We’re thrilled to have him join us and look forward to his enthusiasm and expertise making a strong impact on our journey.”
While serving as the CEO, Mr. Nelson guided NetSuite — widely considered the first SaaS company — as it grew from a startup to a public company serving more than 30,000 organizations and $1 billion in revenue. He spearheaded the $9.3 billion merger of NetSuite with Oracle in 2016. Mr. Nelson is currently an angel investor, philanthropist as well serving as a board member of PagerDuty.
Mr. Nelson said, “I have long admired Freshworks’ unwavering mission to improve the experience between a business and its customers and employees — the two most important stakeholders companies serve. Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed countless attempts at market disruption and I believe Freshworks has what it takes to build software that finally delivers on the ‘easy’ promise of the cloud.”
Mr. Nelson joins the other members of the Freshworks Board of Directors, namely Roxanne Austin, former COO of DIRECTV; Sameer Gandhi, Partner at Accel; Randy Gottfried, former CFO of AppDynamics; Johanna Flower, former CMO at CrowdStrike; and Barry Pagdett, former CRO of Stripe.
