She has her hands full. She’s overseeing an ambitious open source-based company on the cusp of going public with $40 million in fresh capital. These come from funds led by Blackrock in the bank, and busy adding purpose built business solutions for compliance, security, and self-service at the company.
The former VMware executive is among the rare breed of CIOs (for two years at observability platform New Relic) to have stepped into the CEO role. Along with 25 years of experience scaling companies globally in a range of leadership roles, she retains hands-on technical chops, having started out as a software engineer at Accenture (“back when COBOL was cool”; The Stack: “COBOL‘s still cool”; Wassenaar: “I’m very employable…”).
Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar: “People tend to commingle public cloud with cloud native…”
She has been at the helm of Portland, Oregon-headquartered Puppet since January 2019. There she has sharpened focus on specialised tools for larger commercial organisations, and overseen the addition of a wide range of new offerings at the open source-based software configuration management (CM) and deployment provider. Traditionally used to “pull the strings” on multiple application servers simultaneously – as Puppet eyes a chunk of the growing compliance and security markets.
The CEO is gearing up to take the company public later this year. She believes it is ready for after strong numbers last year. She tells The Stack: “In 2020, Puppet’s revenue was north of $100 million. It was growing as we added new customers. We also expanded within our existing enterprise customers and increased the average size of our deals. Our renewal rates are close to 90% and our expansion rates are close to 120%. Gross margins are +80% and we have a strong profit/loss position for a company of our size”.
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