Former Venmo CEO, Braintree COO to transition from current role as President.

Today, I have some exciting news to share about changes to our leadership team. Effective at the start of June, we are promoting Amit Jhawar, President of Attentive, to Chief Executive Officer. With this shift, I will be moving to a new role as Executive Chairman, and I will stay on the company’s board of directors.

This is a change that has been in the works for a while now and was part of our long-term plans for the company. I am a life-long entrepreneur who gets energized by founding and building companies. As we enter this next phase of growth and look towards the prospect of an IPO in the next 12-18 months, I came to the board and recommended that we pass the torch to an operator who will focus on scaling the company.

Attentive is at an incredible inflection point. We are the leader in SMS marketing, enabling our clients to send and receive billions of SMS messages every month. We just finished another great quarter in Q1, hitting both our revenue and new customer goals, while also launching some new exciting products like Attentive AI. We are also at a point where scaling the company (and scaling it properly) is critical, and I believe there is no better person to prepare us for the public markets than Amit.

Amit’s experience spans both investing and operating in technology companies at scale. Before coming to Attentive, Amit was CEO at Venmo and one of the first 30 employees at Braintree Payments as CFO and scaled the business until it was acquired by PayPal in 2013 for $800M. Over the past 2+ years at Attentive, I have had the pleasure to work closely with Amit across every aspect of our company. Through countless conversations, I have seen Amit exercise fantastic decision making, an incredible work ethic, and a genuine care for our employees and customers. 

It has been the honor of my professional life to build this company, and I have been extremely lucky to work with an incredible set of people. We have been through a lot together, from five people in a small sublease from a literary agency to ~1,000 team members today, and I have made the best friends I have in this world. 

I would also like to thank our customers who have helped us build the world’s #1 SMS marketing platform. I’ve learned so much from the different brands we’ve served and they have made our product what it is today.

I will not be going far. I look forward to my continued involvement with the company as the chairman of the board while also pursuing my love of helping entrepreneurs and early stage companies.