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Freshworks Appoints Former CEO of NetSuite, Zach Nelson, to the Board of Directors

San Mateo, Calif
August 16, 2021

Freshworks Inc., a leading software company empowering businesses to delight their customers and employees, announced the appointment of former NetSuite CEO  Zach Nelson, as a new independent member of the board of directors. Mr. Nelson is a pioneer in the enterprise SaaS industry having held leadership positions at Oracle, Sun Microsystems, McAfee, and Netsuite.

“Zach brings tremendous experience building and scaling high-velocity cloud software companies to the Freshworks board,” said Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshworks. “We’re thrilled to have him join us and look forward to his enthusiasm and expertise making a strong impact on our journey.”

While serving as the CEO, Mr. Nelson guided NetSuite — widely considered the first SaaS company —  as it grew from a startup to a public company serving more than 30,000 organizations and $1 billion in revenue. He spearheaded the $9.3 billion merger of NetSuite with Oracle in 2016. Mr. Nelson is currently an angel investor, philanthropist as well serving as a board member of PagerDuty. 

Mr. Nelson said, “I have long admired Freshworks’ unwavering mission to improve the experience between a business and its customers and employees — the two most important stakeholders companies serve. Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed countless attempts at market disruption and I believe Freshworks has what it takes to build software that finally delivers on the “easy” promise of the cloud.”

Mr. Nelson joins the other members of the Freshworks Board of Directors, namely Roxanne Austin, former COO of DIRECTV; Sameer Gandhi, Partner at Accel; Randy Gottfried, former CFO of AppDynamics; Johanna Flower, former CMO at CrowdStrike; and Barry Pagdett, former CRO of Stripe.

About Freshworks

Freshworks makes it fast and easy for businesses to delight their customers and employees. We do this by taking a fresh approach to building and delivering software that is affordable, quick to implement, and designed for the end user. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks has a dedicated team operating from 13 global locations to serve 50,000+ customers including Bridgestone, Chargebee, DeliveryHero, ITV, Klarna, Multichoice, OfficeMax, TaylorMade and Vice Media. For more information visit www.freshworks.com.

© 2021 Freshworks Inc. All rights reserved. Freshworks and its associated logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Freshworks Inc. All other company, brand and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Media Contact: 

Jayne Gonzalez
[email protected] 
408-348-1087

Author Information

As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.

Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.

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