July 27, 2020
July 27, 2020
Paradox, best known for Olivia, their conversational AI platform that helps talent acquisition teams at organizations like McDonald’s, CVS Health, and Unilever create user-centric candidate experiences, has announced the addition of some significant brain/ experience-power to their corporate board.
In May, the company announced the appointment of industry legend Mike Gregoire to chairperson. Now, they are adding former Workday CIO Diana McKenzie, former SAP Chief Strategy Officer Deepak Krishnamurthy, and Stanford University professor Huggy Rao to its board of directors. Each of these appointments is interesting in their own right. The sum tells a heck of a story.
With Gregoire, the company gained someone who has shown significant expertise scaling and monetizing enterprise-level, cloud first offerings, at an executive-lead level. With McKenzie, they bring in a brilliant IT expert who's worked in the guts of one of the most complex, and important, HCM providers on the planet. During her tenure, she reframed information technology as business technology, and helped Workday scale to one of the leading ERP and HCM systems in the world.
Krishnamurthy brings expertise from SAP, yet another massive HCM (Gregoire, it should be noted, sold Taleo to Oracle, and served on ADP's board), with a history of creating innovation and a focus on bridging the gap between start-ups and established global software companies. While at SAP, he led Strategy and Transformation, where he architected an innovation and M&A strategy that resulted in a nearly 3X increase in top line revenue, a 4x increase in market capitalization, and more than $100 billion in incremental shareholder value.
With Rao, the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, they gain a towering intellect with deep expertise on scaling enterprises coupled with a focus on HR and sociology. His recent work investigates the role of social movements as motors of organizational change in professional and organizational fields.
“When we founded Paradox, I made a commitment to building the best possible team to build the best possible products for our clients,” said founder Aaron Matos, who will continue to serve on Paradox’s board. “That starts with recruiting the best employees and board members we can find — and we certainly checked that box with Diana, Deepak, and Huggy. I couldn’t be happier to add all three to our board. They were at the top of my list and we feel incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from them as we scale.”
“The board we’ve assembled says a lot about Paradox’s philosophy on transforming the future of work,” said Gregoire. “It’s not about forcing Talent Acquisition organizations to rip and replace core systems. It’s about integrating seamlessly within the platforms they already use to make them better — whether it’s SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, ADP, Oracle, Cornerstone, ServiceNow, IBM Kenexa, Beamery, HiredScore, or others."
The sum here is: scaling. Paradox is fueling its engines pretty quickly. The question becomes, scaling to acquisition, or into a broad platform all on its own. Time will tell us on that one.
In other words: watch this space.