Jan
15
2020
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Former Docker CEO Steve Singh joins Madrona

Madrona Venture Group announced today that it has hired former Docker CEO Steve Singh as a managing director at the firm.

Singh stepped down as CEO of Docker last May and Seattle-based Madrona seems like a logical landing spot. He is a longtime resident of Seattle, and has been working behind the scenes with Madrona for many years as a strategic director and angel investor, according to the firm.

Singh says that while there are a number of areas he’s interested in, he wants to concentrate on intelligent applications in the enterprise. “While there are a number of broad themes we are excited about, I am particularly passionate about the potential of intelligent applications to transform business and our lives. Next-generation, cloud-native application companies such as Clari, HighSpot and Amperity have incredible opportunities to solve large-scale business challenges and become multi-billion-dollar businesses,” he said in a statement.

He certainly has broad enterprise experience. Beyond Docker, he was chairman and CEO at Concur for more than 20 years, and oversaw the company’s sale to SAP in 2014 for a hefty $8.3 billion. In addition, he sits on a variety of boards, including Clari, Talend, DocuSign and others.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research, says it was clear Singh wouldn’t stay on the sidelines for long with “Retired” on his LinkedIn profile. “Given Singh’s experience and connections, we expect him to be a force to be reckoned with in the VC space,” he told TechCrunch.

Singh joins S. Somasegar, who was a former corporate vice president at Microsoft, and Hope Cochran, who was a longtime CFO and helped take a couple of companies public, as managing directors added at the firm in recent years.

Madrona is celebrating its 25th anniversary in business this year, and can boast that one of its earliest investments was a Series A for a little Seattle startup called Amazon.

May
08
2019
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Steve Singh stepping down as Docker CEO

TechCrunch has learned that Docker CEO Steve Singh will be stepping down after two years at the helm, and former Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden will be taking over. An email announcement went out this morning to Docker employees.

People close to the company confirmed that Singh will be leaving the CEO position, staying on the job for several months to help Bearden with the transition. He will then remain with the organization in his role as chairman of the board. They indicated that Bearden has been working closely with Singh over the last several months as a candidate to join the board and as a consultant to the executive team.

Singh clicked with him and viewed him as a possible successor, especially given his background with leadership positions at several open-source companies, including taking Hortonworks public before selling to Cloudera last year. Singh apparently saw someone who could take the company to the next level as he moved on. As one person put it, he was tired of working 75 hours a week, but he wanted to leave the company in the hands of a capable steward.

Last week in an interview at DockerCon, the company’s annual customer conference in San Francisco, Singh appeared tired, but a leader who was confident in his position and who saw a bright future for his company. He spoke openly about his leadership philosophy and his efforts to lift the company from the doldrums it was in when he took over two years prior, helping transform it from a mostly free open-source offering into a revenue-generating company with 750 paying enterprise customers.

In fact, he told me that under his leadership the company was on track to become free cash flow positive by the end of this fiscal year, a step he said would mean that Docker would no longer need to seek outside capital. He even talked of the company eventually going public.

Apparently, he felt it was time to pass the torch before the company took those steps, saw a suitable successor in Bearden and offered him the position. While it might have made more sense to announce this at DockerCon with the spotlight focused on the company, it was not a done deal yet by the time the conference was underway in San Francisco, people close to the company explained.

Docker took a $92 million investment last year, which some saw as a sign of continuing struggles for the company, but Singh said he took the money to continue to invest in building revenue-generating enterprise products, some of which were announced at DockerCon last week. He indicated that the company would likely not require any additional investment moving forward.

As for Bearden, he is an experienced executive with a history of successful exits. In addition to his experience at Hortonworks, he was COO at SpringSource, a developer tool suite that was sold to VMware for $420 million in 2009 (and is now part of Pivotal). He was also COO at JBoss, an open-source middleware company acquired by Red Hat in 2006.

Whether he will do the same with Docker remains to be seen, but as the new CEO, it will be up to him to guide the company moving forward to the next steps in its evolution, whether that eventually results in a sale or the IPO that Singh alluded to.

Email to staff from Steve Singh:

Note: Docker has now confirmed this story in a press release.

May
04
2017
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Docker’s new CEO sees gargantuan opportunities ahead

 Earlier this week, Docker made the surprise announcement that its long-time CEO Ben Golub was stepping down and that former Concur CEO Steve Singh was stepping into his shoes. While this move surely came as a surprise to many, it was actually in the making for a while. Read More

May
02
2017
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Docker gets a new CEO

 There is change in the air for Docker, the company that helped make software containers popular among developers. But Docker is under pressure from the growing ecosystem of Kubernetes-based services and other startups. So maybe it doesn’t come as a surprise that Docker CEO Ben Golub is stepping down. Golub will be replaced by Steve Singh, who is joining Docker from SAP. Read More

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