Fitbit CFO moves to cloud-services firm Fastly

Dive Brief:

On Tuesday, publicly listed cloud provider Fastly Inc. announced it had hired Ron Kisling, the CFO of Google’s Fitbit unit, as its new CFO.
Kisling will step into the role at San Francisco, Calif.-based Fastly in August, with a focus on achieving profitability, a goal the company has yet to reach after over two years on the public market.
He will succeed Adriel Lares, its CFO of five years, who announced plans to step down in May.

Dive Insight:

Kisling spent four years as Fitbit’s chief accounting officer before becoming its CFO in 2018. In January 2021, Google acquired the wearable fitness tracker for $2.1 billion.

Prior to Fitbit, Kisling served as CFO at other technology companies, including semiconductor-equipment maker Nanometrics and SaaS provider PGP Corporation.

Fastly’s operating system caused a brief global outage of dozens of websites earlier this month. In a June 8 memo, the company said the outage was due to an “undiscovered software bug” unrelated to a cyberattack. The sites were back online within one hour.

In its May earnings call, Fastly reported a 35% year-over-year revenue growth, as well as a $50.7 million net loss, up from a $12 million net loss in the same quarter last year.

Fastly attributed its widened loss to its 2020 acquisition of web application company Signal Sciences for $775 million.

“Adriel is going to be big shoes to fill,” CEO Joshua Bixby said on the call. “We’ve had, over the last few quarters, a number of executive searches for that knowledge and expertise, somebody who has seen a much larger business. We believe we’re poised for continued successful growth many years into the future, [so] we want somebody who has seen that at scale.”

“Ron played a key role in building out Fitbit’s financial leadership function to support public company rigor,” Bixby said in a Tuesday statement. “I am confident Ron will bring the same strong leadership principles to Fastly as an excellent addition to the executive team.”

Representatives for Fastly and for Kisling did not respond to requests for comment.