840: Putting a Spin on Your Talent Pinwheel| Bryan Morris, CFO, Demandbase

Among the recruitment milestones that populate Bryan Morris’s CFO resume, few can match the 6-month talent acquisition binge that he launched during the first quarter of 2015.

“In terms of key hires, I never hired faster than I did then,” comments Morris, as he begins to lay out the circumstances that led to his need to speedily attract and hire talent.

At the time, Morris was the newly appointed CFO of Xamarin, a creator of software tools used for mobile apps development.  

This firm, then led by cofounder and CEO Nat Freidman, had doubled its revenue annually for the previous few years yet had theretofore focused its talent recruitment efforts mainly on nabbing software engineers and intrepid salespeople.

“When it came to people, sales, marketing, and R&D were way out ahead of G&A, so I knew that my first few months would be dedicated to recruiting,” recalls Morris, who notes that until his arrival, the developer had outsourced its accounting function while relying on fractional CFO services to patch any management voids.

“I made five key hires—head of HR, head of technical recruiting, controller, head of FP&A, and our first corporate counsel—all within the first 6 months,” remarks Morris, who believes that hiring can at times benefit from its own momentum.

He explains: “Sometimes, when you’re in a great situation and your company is growing, the press is great and the buzz is good—and what happens is that one great hire begets another. So, I kind of had this pinwheel going.”

Still, what happened next made Morris’s energetic hiring spree all the more consequential. During the second half of 2015, as Xamarin was preparing for another capital raise, Microsoft—one of the developer’s strategic partners—acknowledged that not only would it be willing to serve as a reference on behalf of Xamarin for the venture investor community but also it might be interested in partnering with Xamarin to pursue something more strategic.  

Subsequently, 12 months into Morris’s CFO tenure at Xamarin, company management signed a letter of intent (LOI) to sell the business to Microsoft. Looking back, Morris doesn’t hesitate to expose some of the drama that preceded Microsoft’s signed LOI.

“Here were my team and I—with only some 3 to 6 months of working together—and suddenly we were up against one of the most capable technology buyers in the world,” remembers Morris, who today believes that the timing of Xamarin’s key hires and the timing of the deal were not unrelated events.

“I couldn’t have done it by myself,” observes Morris, who points out that there were a number of 20-hour days during the period leading up to the finalization of the deal.

Morris notes that the merger provided mostly great outcomes for both investors and Xamarin employees—not excluding CEO Nat Friedman, who until late 2021 served as CEO of GitHub, which Microsoft had acquired in 2018.

Looking back on the CEO who hired him and the subsequent “pinwheel effect” that within 6 months transformed Xamarin’s lines of functional management, Morris highlights a shared mission: “Luckily, Nat was completely on board—he knew what I was inheriting, so he gave me the green light to go ahead and hire.” –Jack Sweeney