Beaverton software maker Responsive hired its first chief financial officer in a move that signals further maturity of the fast-growing company.
Shankha Sen was named to the post. Sen was most recently group vice president of finance for education industry software maker PowerSchool. That company was taken private earlier this year in a $5.6 billion acquisition by Bain Capital. Prior to that, Sen spent 14 years at enterprise open source software maker Red Hat Software. There he was vice president of global finance and led the team through the company’s $34 billion acquisition by IBM.
The CFO role is the latest addition to the C-suite and is meant to build executive talent that will take the company to the next stage of growth, said co-founder and CEO Ganesh Shankar.
“We are bringing more financial rigor to the company,” he said, adding that Responsive continues to grow profitably.
Sen’s experience with companies, both public and private, that are of a larger scale than Responsive was part of what made him a good fit for the role, said Shankar.
“We have been looking for this role for quite some time. We were not in a rush, it’s purely from corporate strategy. We are feeling the long game and there is a big market ahead of us. We want to prepare ourselves for that journey," said Shankar.
One area Shankar expects Sen’s expertise to be relevant is expanding Responsive’s reach into Asia and Latin America. Shankar also noted that Sen has first-hand experience with the pain point that Responsive’s product solves, since he has been responsible for answering finance questions for different stakeholders.
“I believe Responsive is well-positioned to become the breakout category leader in Strategic Response Management — the next ‘must have’ go-to-market software-as-a-service solution for companies focused on driving growth via compelling responses including RFPs and tenders,” said Sen in a written statement.
Responsive — which was previously known as RFPIO — makes software used by corporate teams respond to inquiries faster and more efficiently. Initially the product was aimed at RFPs but it quickly grew to incorporate helping teams collaborate on many kinds of business questions, such as handling requests for interest or qualifications, security questionnaires and analyst questions.
The company has about 2,000 customers. Over the last three years it has grown 177% and ranked 2,863 on the Inc. 5000.
Over the last two years, the company has also added CMO Michael Londgren and Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Santelices.
Responsive has 510 employees, and Shankar expects the company will hit 550 people by the end of the year. About 130 employees are in Oregon and the rest are based out of offices in Kansas and Coimbatore, India.
In addition to rounding out the company’s C-level talent, Shankar has been building the bench for the next level down in management.
Meera Raman was hired as vice president of operations. She was most recently a senior director at Meta. Ben Stokes was hired as regional vice president of sales. He was most recently vice president of global sales at Whistic.
