Contentful, the leading enterprise headless CMS, today announced the appointment of Steve Sloan as Chief Executive Officer. Sloan joins Contentful to guide its sustained exponential growth at scale, which has seen enterprise revenue double each year over the past three years.
Sloan has extensive experience as a product, marketing and technology leader in market-leading, high-growth enterprise SaaS organizations. He was most recently Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Twilio SendGrid, and previously Senior Vice President of Product, Engineering & Operations at Marketo.
Sloan succeeds co-founder Sascha Konietzke, who drove this change in close collaboration with Contentful’s board. Konietzke will remain an active board member and transition to a new role as Chief Strategy Officer, in which he will work closely with Sloan to define Contentful’s company and product strategy.
“Steve is a dynamic technology leader, bringing a wealth of experience with market-leading companies in the digital experience stack,” Konietzke said. “He has a track record of guiding high-growth global SaaS organizations, plus a deep understanding of our customers’ needs. That makes Steve the ideal CEO to guide us through our next phases of growth.”
Launched in 2013, Contentful is the pioneer and market leader in “headless” content management, which separates the content repository from the presentation layer (the “head”), enabling brands to manage content on any digital channel. While originally focused on providing a content management platform to developers and digital teams, now Contentful offers a unified content layer for the entire enterprise, enabling organizations to create omnichannel digital experiences such as modern stack websites, content hubs, agile ecommerce, support portals and knowledge bases, mobile apps, and onsite experiences.
Customers, including the Aldo Group, Bang & Olufsen, Danone, Spotify, Heineken and Telus, use Contentful to accelerate their digital experiences to market and efficiently scale their capabilities across digital products, teams and platforms.
Contentful’s exponential growth year over year serving leading enterprises — including hundreds of billion-dollar-revenue brands — also prompted the hiring of senior leaders in product, customer success, partnerships, engineering and human resources, and the expansion of offices in San Francisco and Berlin to accommodate doubling employee headcount.
“Sascha, Paolo and the Contentful team have built a high-performing company that is redefining how enterprises build digital at scale,” Sloan said. “It’s a massive opportunity to help brands create engaging, beautiful and immersive digital experiences. I’m thrilled to join the headless CMS market leader with the shared vision of continuing Contentful’s exponential growth and delivering more products and experiences that our customers love and value.”
“Steve joins Contentful at a key point in its evolution. With his vast experience of fueling growth and scaling companies even after they became public, he will be a vital asset to lead Contentful through its next stages of growth,” said Andreas Weiskam, co-founder and managing director at Sapphire Ventures and member of Contentful’s board of directors.
Sloan will work from Contentful’s San Francisco office. Sloan holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Additional Information
- Feature photos: New CEO Steve Sloan with founders Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri in Berlin. Photo credit: Savannah van der Niet
- Steve Sloan headshot | Sascha Konietzke headshot | Paolo Negri headshot
- Feature photo: Inside Contentful’s Berlin cafe
- Read the Forrester Wave Report for Web CMS
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