Freshworks’s Mathrubootham scores another top-hire win with Mika Yamamoto as CCMO
Even when Freshworks was a much smaller startup, Girish Mathrubootham just beginning his foray into the US market, one thing reporters like me would always hear about was Girish’s ability to surround himself with exceptional colleagues and soak up everything he could learn from them. As many of you know, he likes to call them people who’ve “been there done that,” whether it’s someone who’s helped take a software company in US to its IPO or someone who’s already seen what a global technology business looks like with $20 billion in revenue. The appointment of Mika Yamamoto as the company’s new chief customer and marketing officer looks like another win for Girish in that tradition that he’s established. Mika, who will be responsible for leading the company’s global marketing and customer experience teams, comes to Freshworks from F5, also a Nasdaq-listed company, where she most recently served as the Executive Vice President and the Chief Marketing and Customer Engagement Officer, according to Freshworks’s press release from Nov. 28. At F5 she led the company’s data, marketing, digital transformation, and customer experience efforts for products, segments, channels, and geographies. Mika joined the executive team at Freshworks on Nov. 20 and reports to Girish, founder and CEO, and President Dennis Woodside. “Mika’s combined CMO and CXO roles have given her a unique perspective that has ultimately led to innovative, measurable changes for employees, customers, and prospects,” Woodside said in the press release. “She has a long-standing track record of leading global and diverse customer experience teams and delivering exceptional go-to-market results at large public technology companies with multi-domain businesses serving customers big and small,” he added. Before F5, Mika was president at a company called Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe, and then she was a senior VP at Adobe for a bit. She has previously served as Chief Digital Marketing Officer and CMO of SMB at SAP, and held senior leadership roles, working approximately six year each at Amazon, in the books business, Microsoft, in the Windows and Stores businesses, research at Gartner, and as a manager at Accenture where she started her career in 1994. Mika has a BCom (Honours) degree in Economics and Marketing from Queen’s University in Canada, according to her LinkedIn profile. The Freshworks press release says she holds a B.A. in Commerce, with a focus on Economics and Marketing. “My whole career has been spent on transforming go-to-market approaches and customer experiences within global companies to steepen the growth curve,” she says in the press release. I truly believe that bringing the end-to-end customer experience with marketing and customer success teams together at Freshworks will help accelerate growth while keeping our customers at the heart of all we do.” She also serves on the boards of BlackLine, another Nasdaq-listed cloud software company that specializes in finance and accounting, where she chairs the compensation committee; and the Rainier Valley Food Bank and the United Way of King County. Yamamoto, by the way, is a well-known Japanese surname. In fact, another Mika Yamamoto was an award-winning Japanese photo and video journalist who died in the line of duty while she was covering the conflict in Syria in 2012. Perhaps the most well-known Yamamoto was Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral, who is widely believed to have been opposed to war, but when he was overruled, ended up as the decision-maker behind the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which united the Americans in the decision to enter the second world war. The name Yamamoto, in Japanese, means one who lives in the mountains or one who dwells at the foot of a mountain.