The change will take effect immediately, said Jay Parikh, Lacework’s second co-CEO and former Facebook’s vice president of engineering. The change makes Parikh the sole CEO of a prominent up-and-coming private company in cloud security that reached an $8.3 billion valuation last year.
Racework had planned to notify employees of the change on Tuesday. Former President of Pure Storage, Hatfield will leave Lacework’s management team just months before his second year at the company.
As part of the co-CEO model, Hatfield, nicknamed “Hat”, focused on running and expanding the business at Lacework, which raised $1.85 billion in funding.Hatfield will become CEO in early 2021. I joined Lacework as cum chairman. He was not immediately reachable on Tuesday.
Parikh joined as Co-CEO in mid-2021 and has focused on the company’s products and engineering. The two have known each other since 20 years before him, and previously she worked at Akamai Technologies at the same time.
In an interview with Protocol, Parikh characterized the move as deliberate and amicable, prompted by conversations between “Hat, me, and the board,” saying the co-CEO model was no longer the best fit for the company. I have come to a conclusion. Racework’s executives and board are “considering where the business is today and what it takes to get to the next level,” and it’s now possible to “consolidate the company” under a single CEO. I decided it made the most sense.
When it comes to Lacework’s product and sales strategy, and its relationship with customers, partners, and large public cloud platforms, the move should help “make sure everything is aligned.” [around] One focus, one priority,” he said.
Racework CEO Jay Parikh
www.protocol.com
Parikh said he doesn’t believe Hatfield has “immediate plans to jump into anything full-time anytime soon.” Hatfield is “still going to spend a lot of time” on racework, Parikh told Protocol.
Founded in 2014, Lacework provides “data-driven” services that aim to stand out in the rapidly growing cloud security market by collecting and analyzing data from across the customer’s cloud environment. The goal is to provide customers with critical security insights, including which threats to prioritize for action, the company said.
The company raised a $525 million funding round in January 2021, followed by another $1.3 billion in November 2021, resulting in a valuation of $8.3 billion. According to CB Insights, Lacework touts the round as “the largest funding round in the history of the security industry,” ranking him third for the highest valuation of any privately held security company.
It’s also worth noting that Lacework is the third company to hatch from Sutter Hill Ventures, following the model used to launch Pure Storage and Snowflake. The Lacework platform supports AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Kubernetes environments.
In May, Lacework revealed that it laid off 20% of its staff in response to what its co-CEOs described at the time as “dramatic changes” in “both the public and private markets.” The company had previously reported that he had over 1,000 employees as of March, but it wasn’t immediately available on Tuesday how many he currently has.
Prior to Lacework, Hatfield served as president of Pure Storage for nearly seven years, followed by 16 months as vice chairman, according to his LinkedIn. A few years after its founding, he joined the company as president in 2013 and remained with the company through its initial public offering and its first few years as a public company.
There are no plans to replace Hatfield directly at Racework, but given the unification of CEO duties under Parikh’s leadership, the company plans to hire a chief revenue officer in the near future, he said. Mr Parikh said.
Ultimately, Lacework’s management focused on making the move to prepare, saying, “We’re not building this as a deal to be successful over the next 10, 20 years.” Yes, Mr Parikh said.