As you may have heard, Prashanth Chandrasekar will be joining Stack Overflow as it’s new CEO. There will be plenty of opportunities to hear more from Prashanth over the next few months, but we wanted to briefly introduce you to the person who will be shaping the future of Stack Overflow.
What makes you so excited to take on this role as CEO?
I’m thrilled about this opportunity. Stack Overflow’s impact on the world of software development is already massive. Every month, over 50 million developers from every part of the world use Stack Overflow’s community and platform to ask questions, find solutions, and share their knowledge with others. It is literally the default destination for software developers from around the world. When I first saw the live heat map of users visiting from nations around the world, I was blown away by the scale, diversity and impact of this company’s reach. In addition, the significant interest from customers in Stack Overflow’s SaaS products including its hyper-growth Stack Overflow for Teams collaboration platform (which is growing at ~150% Y-o-Y) and Stack Overflow for Talent solutions that enable their developers and knowledge workers rapidly contribute to our technology-led society, is indicative of the tremendous potential of the company to make a profound and positive difference in people’s lives.
What were your early connections to software development and coding?
I felt a connection to software development and coding at a young age, and it’s threaded through my entire career. I grew up in Bangalore, India which is known as the Silicon Valley of India, so I was surrounded by technology from an early age. My father was part of the wave of professionals in India that helped establish the technology and knowledge economy in India in the 90s. He got me my first computer when I was 10-years-old. The first language I learned to program with was Logo. I moved quickly to BASIC, and my first fully fleshed out software application was something I created in 10th grade for my final class project. My mother is a medical doctor, and I wrote a software application that would help her manage her patient records, diagnoses and track their condition over time. Before that she relied entirely on paper files.
I continued my education in computer engineering at the University of Maine in the US. That's where I learned all my formative computer science and computer engineering skills and had the opportunity to work as a Software Engineer at companies like National Semiconductor and Cabletron. My senior year final project was a Perl application that was a web-based monitoring software for semiconductor manufacturing plants.
A particularly defining experience for me in college was when I was elected to be the President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). At ACM, we organized hackathons and coding contests, and I found that I loved leading efforts and teams that made a difference to the community. When you build a piece of software, there is a wonderful sense of creative control, and the satisfaction that comes from solving a discrete problem is tremendous. But I was learning that I also liked the challenge of getting people to work together to build great things - I really got excited about leading teams and ultimately organizations. I starting thinking about the macro picture and perspective and what would maximize my impact in the world. For me, it would be to learn about business and management. So when I finished my studies at Maine, I enrolled at Cornell to get my masters in engineering management. After that, I worked as a management consultant at CapGemini and then I went on to Harvard Business School. To continue my accelerated business learning post business school, I worked as an investment banker at Barclays in the technology, media and telecom group. I learned a lot about finance, public markets, deal making, and working with folks at the executive level at large technology companies.
What were you doing just before Stack Overflow?
For the past seven years I’ve been at Rackspace where I’ve held several operating leadership roles. It’s been a fantastic experience helping transform the company into a cloud and IT services leader and leading some tremendous talent at the company. We collectively built and scaled some of Rackspace’s fastest growing businesses. One of my key experiences was to lead a global organization to build Rackspace’s hyper-growth Global Managed Public Clouds business, where my organization served companies around the world that needed help migrating and running on AWS, Azure and Google. We rapidly built and grew that business from scratch and helped Rackspace successfully evolve from a leading managed hosting company to a leading cloud services company. Between 2016-2019, we received a top global ranking in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional & Managed Services for three years in a row (every year of existence). I’m very proud of what the team was able to accomplish in such a short period of time as it provides a fundamental foundation for Rackspace to help customers on their cloud journey. Another formative learning experience was to build Rackspace’s DevOps offering, helping customers with configuration management, infrastructure automation, log aggregation, etc. Through these experiences and in addition to the go-to-market responsibilities of my roles, I’ve had the privilege to lead product and engineering organizations and work closely with teams of product engineers, software developers and DevOps engineers.
What’s your vision for Stack Overflow?
Throughout my career, I’ve been focused on making an impact—with software and technology as the foundational link. There’s no other company that has Stack Overflow’s global reach with developers. This is especially evident in developing nations, where people across socio-economic strata are able to get a rapid education by leveraging our platform and community to make a difference for themselves, their families and their societies. So by serving as an invaluable resource to over 50 million developers all over the world, we have an enormous responsibility to continue to make the field of software development more welcoming, diverse, and inclusive. We have the opportunity to leverage our platform and voice in the ecosystem to make a difference on key topics like gender diversity and an inclusive global workforce - i.e., we have an opportunity to support everyone who codes, everywhere, in continuing to write the script for the future. I’m really excited about the work that Sara Chipps, Stack Overflow’s Director of Public Q&A, is doing with her Community-focused team. I can’t wait to support that team to accelerate their work.
I also believe that Stack Overflow’s business and SaaS products, and specifically its approach to knowledge management, can become equally ubiquitous in development teams and teams with knowledge workers. Internal, private versions of Stack Overflow have become invaluable tools inside of large, innovative Enterprises like Bloomberg, Lyft, and Microsoft. Startups and medium size businesses from within and outside the tech sector are also discovering that the Stack Overflow for Teams product can help make their organization more agile, productive and collaborative. I’m excited to help realize Stack Overflow’s mission of helping write the script of the future by serving software developers and knowledge workers in companies of all sizes and around the world. My vision for the company is to combine the best aspects of our community, technology, products, and business to enable each part to grow and make an even deeper impact on the massive software development and knowledge management ecosystem.
Do you have plans to continue to connect with the community?
Of course! I officially start on October 1, and after that you’ll continue to hear from me about my vision for the company. I’ll connect with the community on this blog, on the site, at conferences and events, and rumor has it Stack Overflow is bringing its podcast back--maybe you’ll see me there, too!