How Stack Overflow’s new CEO plans to kickstart enterprise growth
Stack Overflow has long been the Q&A site of choice for developers. But while that’s what most people know the company for, it has also built out a jobs site and Teams, its private Q&A service for enterprise clients, over the years. Now, it’s looking to capitalize on that and kickstart growth of Teams, especially, under its new CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar.
Chandrasekar, a former investment banker and Rackspace exec, took over as Stack Overflow’s CEO. Teresa Dietrich, who was previously at McKinsey New Ventures, joined him at the beginning of the year as the company’s chief product officer. Ahead of today’s Teams product update, which mostly includes a number of new integrations, I sat down with Chandrasekar and Dietrich to talk about the company’s plans for the future and the role Teams will play in that.
Chandrasekar tells me that Stack Overflow itself, even after 12 years, has about 50 million monthly users. In addition, another 70 million each month visit the rest of the Stack Exchange sites around culture, science and other topics.
The Stack Overflow jobs product accounts for about half of the company’s revenue, he also noted. “That’s the very steady business that has existed for all of the entire duration of the company’s life,” he said. Ads and the Teams product split the remaining 50%, but it’s the two-and-a-half-year-old Teams service that is seeing the strongest growth now, with revenue nearly doubling year-over-year. “Our expectation is that in the next couple of years, it’ll become the primary business for us,” he said, adding that this is also why he took this job.
“The company has always done a great job creating these products and the community continues to thrive,” Chandrasekar said. “But at the same time, there was a recognition that for us to really scale this in the context of a true SaaS company, you need several fundamental components we had to put in place.”
The first task was to bring in someone who had experience scaling organizations, which is why Chandrasekar was hired. He also brought on Dietrich as CPO, as well as new VP of Customer Success Jeff Justice (formerly with Dropbox), and will soon announce a new chief revenue officer. “All these components we’ve put in place so that we can actually be a high-scale SaaS company,” said Chandrasekar. “That’s really where we’re headed.”
Stack Overflow has long been the Q&A site of choice for developers. But while that’s what most people know the company for, it has also built out a jobs site and Teams, its private Q&A service for enterprise clients, over the years. Now, it’s looking to capitalize on that and…
Recent Posts
- Nvidia CEO says don’t give up learning new skills — just maybe leave programming to AI
- The Swatch x Omega Snoopy MoonSwatch Has Landed
- Surveillance has a body count
- You can now finally use Sonos Voice Control with Spotify tunes – here’s how
- Apex Legends tournament disrupted by rogue RCE exploit hack
Archives
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- December 2011