After $1.8B acquisition, Stack Overflow names new CFO

Dive Brief:

Stack Overflow, an online community for software developers that is among the top 50 most visited websites in the world, announced its hire of Matt Gallatin as CFO on Tuesday. Gallatin joined the company on August 16 after former CFO Jerry Raphael resigned in March to lead finance at cybersecurity startup Axonius.
Gallatin’s hire came two weeks after Stack Overflow was acquired by Prosus, a global consumer internet group and one of the world’s largest technology investors, for $1.8 billion.
Gallatin previously served as CFO of Calif.-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Reltio, tech firm Drawbridge (which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2019), and SaaS company OneLogin. He will oversee all financial operations and help drive strategic growth across Stack Overflow’s two lines of business: Stack Overflow for Teams and Reach & Relevance. "In all of my previous roles, I have tried to identify ways my team and I can become trusted business partners to the rest of the organization," Gallatin told CFO Dive in an email. "By helping business owners develop unique insights into their functional areas, we can improve operational outcomes. And in developing deeper operational insights, we can help to build more predictable and reliable financial outcomes."

Dive Insight:

Prosus' acquisition will not change fundamental company leadership or operations, because Stack Overflow is a wholly owned subsidiary, Gallatin said. "However, we look forward to Prosus’ ability to accelerate our growth, especially when it comes to international expansion and other areas where they have significant insight and expertise."

Stack Overflow’s main product is its free question-and-answer site geared towards developers, which attracts about 100 million visitors each month. It was founded in 2008, is headquartered in New York, and employs about 300, including a 16-person finance and accounting team.

Before the acquisition, Stack Overflow received backing from numerous venture firms, including Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, and raised over $150 million in capital.

"I’m looking forward to joining a company that is reshaping how people learn and share technical knowledge and skills while also reimagining the future of how we work," Gallatin said.

Since 2017, the company has offered an enterprise subscription service for employees within an organization, allowing them to collaborate on a private platform. About 5,000 companies have subscribed, and the program now makes up half of Stack Overflow’s revenue, it told The Wall Street Journal.

The company hopes Gallatin will aid in its capital allocation decisions and improve the predictability of its financial results, its CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, told the Journal.

Matt Gallatin

Courtesy of Stack Overflow

Those goals fit well with Gallatin's aims in taking the position. “One of our strategic priorities is predictable and reliable financial performance, which as a CFO is just everything I could hope for,” Gallatin said.

Gallatin's immediate priorities include investing in data analytics to enhance the company’s forecasting capabilities, working with company leadership to develop its financial and operating plan for 2022, as well as focusing on retaining and developing the finance department talent, he told CFO Dive.

The company expects its enterprise subscription business to generate most of its revenue in the coming years, Chandrasekar said, adding that the company was profitable in the three years leading up to Prosus’ acquisition.