Introduction
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Clari is a connected revenue operations platform that uses AI and automation to unlock the data captured in business processes. Clari helps turn strategic goals into superior performance and sales teams into revenue machines. Clari continues to innovate, collaborate, and push the limits to build marketing, sales, and customer success professionals across 170 companies such as Okta, Zoom, Medallia, Adobe, and Atlassian. The company has always envisioned the India office as a development center doubling down on investments to support all the efforts in India to continue innovating in several areas of the product.
Problem Statement
With the vision to make the India team independent and have suitable technical leadership upon execution of new projects alongside leveraging US tech expertise, Clari was on the lookout for a leader experienced in driving the company’s technological development roadmap, product layout plan, and engineering practices over the long run. It had been a while since Clari was searching for a leader with extensive experience in Engineering and Data Science roles, as well as an overview of all aspects of business, technology, and data science. Clari sought an entrepreneurial VP of Engineering / Head of Engineering who was passionate about building elite – teams, ideas, architectures, and platforms. Clari needed a leader that would bring a strategic mindset and drive to solve business and technical challenges for the India Engineering team. A tech leader capable of becoming a brand ambassador for the Clari India tech team. The company was primarily seeking a Site Leader for India who would be both a thought leader and a people person.
Solution and Execution
Upon Clari’s role mandate, Purple Quarter dived in to search for an ideal and culturally fit candidate. After carefully drafting the need and precisely profiling the candidates, only the best-fit profiles were shared. Clari has always envisioned the India office as a key development center and is doubling down on investments to support all the efforts in India to continue innovating in several areas of the product. Since Clari was aspiring to have a strong presence in India and expanding the Engineering team at that time, it became difficult to persuade the candidate that the position covered all areas. In addition to numerous discussions regarding Clari’s advancement strategy across geographies and the vision for the India team to become independent and with enough technical leadership after talking about multiple data points with Vishy, selling Clari proved to be a challenging endeavor.
With years of expertise in the executive search for tech leadership and a consultative approach in furtherance to the requirement, Purple Quarter made an early closure with Vishy Ranganatha. Purple Quarter’s tech, talent pool and robust network made the search for Vishy Ranganath effortless. An IIM Madras alumnus, Vishy Ranganathan, was the erstwhile Engineering Leader at Google before his appointment. He has around 27 years of industry experience and hands-on expertise in playing multiple roles from bringing business acumen, lead engineer for various security features, ingestion from data sources, and solving problems at a large scale. In his previous stints, he was associated with Intuit and MindTree and played integral roles like Delivery Manager for multiple US-based customer accounts in strategic direction and future growth entwined with the organization’s tech vision. Purple Quarter was able to drive the candidate.
Looking Forward
Purple Quarter with its specialized tech-centric approach, played a crucial role in closing Clari’s Vice President of Engineering mandate. Even before the Series F funding round, Clari was flourishing. Vishy’s deployment in Clari’s roadmap suggests the company’s trajectory in a fast-track mode. The organization is expanding its revenue operations team. Clari, the developer of a revenue operations platform, has closed a $225 million Series F round, raising the company’s total valuation to more than $2.6 billion. Having just completed a new round of funding that has increased the company’s valuation by more than four times in two years, Vishy is now seen expanding the Engineering team by calling out Principal Engineers at Clari. Purple Quarter envisioned Vishy to be the ideal mandate upon Clari’s requirement for a tech leadership search. With Vishy leading the Tech front, Clari is experiencing rapid growth with India team expansion and accelerated operations.
