Tariq Shaukat had plenty of opportunities to move elsewhere after helping lead Bumble Inc. to its 2021 initial public offering. But he also had a lot of reasons to stay in Austin.
For one, his family moved here during the pandemic, which had its own set of difficulties. And now his children are in middle and high school in Austin, which he didn't want to disrupt.
His personal and professional lives lined up perfectly earlier this year. As he was transitioning out of his job as president of Bumble (Nasdaq: BMBL), a dating and social networking company, he connected with Olivier Gaudin, founder and CEO of Sonar, a software company focused on clean computer code.
"I had known Olivier for a little while, and Austin is a big town but a relatively small tech community," Shaukat said. "So I got to know him and was really fascinated by what he was doing ... and we started talking about how could we partner together to take Sonar to the next level. So it really came out kind of serendipitously as a result of my other news."
Shaukat was announced Sept. 12 as co-CEO and a board member of Sonar, a Geneva, Switzerland-based company that operates legally as SonarSource SA. It's developed a platform that helps a wide variety of coders and businesses write and vet clean coding language to prevent bugs and privacy issues. The company, which had a $4.7 billion valuation when it raised a $412 million funding round last year, generates more than $200 million in annualized revenue. Its second-largest office is in Austin, which the company has called a second headquarters.
"Having something with a very strong local presence was important," Shaukat said. "And then, from my standpoint, you don't often see companies that have this large presence in Austin want to grow in Austin and have the fundamentals that I saw in Sonar of that 7 million developer base."
Sonar was founded in 2008. It currently has about 500 employees, about a quarter of which are in the Austin area. The company first opened an Austin office, primarily for sales functions, in April 2018 at 111 W. Sixth St. Last year, the company moved to a 28,000-square-foot office at 206 E. Ninth St.
Shaukat said he expects the local office to keep adding new faces, though he didn't outline any specific hiring plans. It currently lists more than 20 job openings online, with at least three specifically mentioning Austin as a possible location.
"We have a lot of plans to base a lot of the growth here in Austin," he said. "We think it's a terrific market. From a talent standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, it's just a great fit for the company."
It also seems to be a fit for Shaukat, who started his new role a week ago.
So what does one do in the first week of co-leading a $4.7 billion company with a 15-year history?
"It has a really strong legacy. It has a really strong product and engineering base. It's got this community, it's got a really strong and pretty distinctive culture, as I'm learning it," he said. "So you don't want to come in and mess any of that up. A lot of my first couple of weeks is listening to the team and listening to developers and speaking to customers and understanding what they love and what they don't love about the product. It's the old adage of 'first do no harm.'"
Shaukat was president of Google Cloud from 2016 to 2020. Then he joined Bumble to help founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd with a $2.2 billion IPO, although the company's stock has taken a hit on Wall Street this year, with shares down about 23% since the start of 2023.
Shaukat said he hopes to bring some of the lessons learned from his last stop to Sonar.
"A lot of people will scratch their head and say that's a consumer company in the dating and social connection space, and this is a DevOps tool — like they couldn't be more different," he said. "But I somewhat jokingly say 'developers are people too,' and the business is actually not all that different from a business like Bumble."
Both companies, he said, have a strong sense of purpose. But, even though he's in listen-and-learn mode, Shaukat says there's a ton of potential to unlock.
"Of course we have ideas of how we can grow," he said. "There's a lot of opportunities to grow geographically. I mentioned the AI opportunity. We think there's a lot of ways for us to expand our go to market and so we'll be working on those things. But right now, it's learning the business for me and learning how I can have an impact without messing up things that are working really well."
