Zendesk names new board members

Zendesk has announced three appointments to its board of directors: Caryn Marooney, vice president of technology communications at Facebook; Elizabeth “Betsey” Nelson, former chief financial officer of Macromedia; and former Amazon.com General Counsel Michelle Wilson.

  • Thursday, 6th February 2014 Posted 10 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The appointments come as Zendesk separately announced that it reached 40,000 customers now using its software to serve more than 300 million people worldwide.


The three directors bring a breadth of experience in communications and marketing, finance and law to the board. They join current directors Peter Fenton, a general partner at Benchmark; Dana Stalder, a general partner at Matrix Partners; Mikkel Svane, Zendesk CEO and founder; and Devdutt Yellurkar, a partner at Charles River Ventures.


“Caryn, Betsey and Michelle know what it takes to turn growing companies into some of the most respected brands in the world,” Svane said. “Their talents will help us share our vision for bringing companies and customers closer together with even more people around the world.”


Marooney leads Facebook’s product, platform, infrastructure and technical recruiting communications. Prior to joining Facebook in 2011, Marooney co-founded the OutCast Agency, where she was the CEO and responsible for the planning and execution of communications for companies such as Amazon.com, Netflix, salesforce.com and VMware.


The chair of Zendesk’s audit committee, Nelson served as the executive vice president and chief financial officer from 1996 to 2005 at Macromedia (acquired by Adobe), and currently is on the board of directors of Pandora, Nokia and LivingSocial. Previously, she held board seats at Ancestry.com, SuccessFactors and Autodesk.


As Amazon.com’s general counsel from 1999 to 2012, Wilson led the company's legal, intellectual property, government affairs, and compliance and ethics functions and was the company's corporate secretary, working closely with the board of directors. She was promoted to senior vice president in 2001, and she participated in operating and strategic decisions across the company.


New Sales, People Operations Executives
Zendesk also has made notable additions to its executive team with Marcus Bragg as senior vice president of worldwide sales and customer success, and Anne Raimondi as vice president of people operations.


Bragg began his career at RightNow Technologies, a SaaS-based CRM and customer experience software provider, as its third team member in 1998. He led global sales, professional services and client success as RightNow grew to over 1,000 employees and became a public company. He joined Oracle after its 2012 acquisition of RightNow, where he served as group vice president of customer experience and CRM.


Raimondi joined Zendesk from TaskRabbit, where she was the chief revenue officer. Previously, she was a founding team member at Blue Nile, then joined eBay where she launched eBay Stores and headed marketing, merchandising and seller features. She also has served as vice president of product and marketing for Insider Pages (acquired by Citysearch/IAC), head of product and user experience at Zazzle, and vice president of marketing for SurveyMonkey.