A few months ago, I announced my plans to find my successor as we approached our next phase of growth. Today, I am very excited to announce that Mark Templeton will be joining us as DigitalOcean’s new CEO.
We were looking for a leader who could scale our operations, evolve our go-to-market strategy, and help us reach our audacious vision of becoming every developer’s cloud platform of choice when deploying software. After spending time with Mark, I knew that he was the perfect fit for us.
From 2001 to 2015, he served as president and CEO of Citrix Systems. While at Citrix, Mark helped grow the business from $15 million in revenue with one product, one customer segment, and one go-to-market path to a global industry leader with more than 100 million users and annual revenue of over $3 billion. He joined the company prior to its initial public offering and served in a leadership capacity throughout his 20-plus years with the organization. Under his leadership, Citrix earned multiple “best places to work” awards and Mark himself was honored with several awards including a coveted spot on Glassdoor’s Highest Rated CEOs list in 2013.
When I asked him what he saw in DigitalOcean, he replied that he was inspired by our unique position in the market and focus on delivering simplicity at scale. He went on to talk about our incredible team, happy customers, and what perfect timing it was to make an enormous impact on the industry. He compared the opportunity to his early days at Citrix — when the company had a singular focus on offering the best remote access technology in the world. That focus was the seed of the Citrix vision of a virtual workplace, inspired by the deep belief that work was not a place.
Mark believes we have an incredible opportunity to serve tens of millions of developers and the digital-first businesses they go on to create. He shares our focus on simplicity and supports our efforts to ensure our cloud is an enabler for a future that accelerates software development and inspires innovation among our customers. Mark will help DigitalOcean operate and scale to a whole new level while doubling down on our strategy to be the world’s simplest cloud experience.
We are so fortunate to gain a leader with Mark’s experience, talent, and vision. DigitalOcean is at an inflection point and we’ve laid the groundwork together for this rocket ship to soar. We now have a $200 million run rate and a community that is more than 3.5 million developers strong. As we enter into our next chapter, I am confident Mark is the right leader to inspire and scale our team, accelerate our business, and most importantly, uphold our commitment to our customers and the developer community at large.
Please join us in welcoming Mark on what promises to be an exciting journey!
Ben Uretsky
Co-Founder, DigitalOcean
