As the startup community quietly awaits Hootsuite’s rumoured IPO, CEO and founder Ryan Holmes sat down with The Disruptors host Amber Kanwar about making a unicorn.
“We have our alliance partners like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and they’re all valued partners,” said Holmes. “Our value proposition is to be a social media Switzerland. A single place to deploy content on social, to engage with customers, support them, and learn through analytics how effective your campaigning is.”
“There’s an if and when we IPO and that may happen in the next while. But we’re not in a rush.”
Kanwar brought up Twitter’s recent stock turbulence, and asked Holmes if he was optimistic about working off the Twitter platform. Holmes said that he was impressed with CEO Jack Dorsey, who has expressed an openness to working with developers like Hootsuite. “I prefer not to speculate in terms of the economics of Twitter and what might happen in the future, but it will continue as a software and a platform regardless of where they go with their business model,” he said. “The consumer time and eyeballs are just too valuable. Anybody would be interested in taking that company on.”
Over the past year, Hootsuite has brought on executives from billion dollar companies like Penny Wilson, formerly of Juniper Networks, and Sujeet Kini from OpenText. And as Kanwar wondered if 2016 would be the year of the company’s IPO, Holmes said that, while it’s possible, he’s really been focusing on bringing these executives on to help with that path. “I want to drive my company from $1 billion to $10 billion over the next few years, and I get excited because there’s a clear path to that,” he said. “We’re building a great company and there’s an if and when we IPO and that may happen in the next while. But we’re not in a rush.”
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