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01/13/14 | Uncategorized

Cloud Software Company New Relic Adds Square CFO Sarah Friar to Board

While companies like Apple strive to increase diversity on their boards and executive teams, software startups like New Relic are bringing on top female tech talent early.

By Betsy Mikel (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0)

New Relic, a cloud-based software analytics company that raised $80 million last year to expand its business monitoring product to mobile, just appointmented Sarah Friar to its Board of Directors. Friar is the CFO and Operations Lead of Square and will speak at our Women 2.0 BIG Tech Conference in February on finding and founding success.

According to Venture Beat, Friar will “recruit and retain talent, support current CFO Mark Sachleben and provide strategic input to the company.” She brings her financial and technology experience to a board that includes New Relic CEO Lew Cirne, Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital (chairman), Dan Scholnick of Trinity Ventures and Peter Currie of Currie Capital.

“Sarah’s experience with other product-first companies is highly relevant to New Relic’s commitment to delivering the most useful and innovative tools available for the people who build and run modern software,” said Cirne in a New Relic press release.

Before joining Square as CFO in June 2012, Friar was was the Senior Vice President for finance and strategy at Salesforce.com. She previously worked at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.

Sarah Friar is not the only female New Relic has appointed to an executive position. New Relic also hired Robin Schulman as its general counsel. Schulman previously was legal counsel at Adobe. Last month, the company hired Hilarie Koplow-McAdams as Chief Revenue Officer. She was previously the president of global sales at Salesforce.com.

“With the addition of Sarah to our board, Hilarie as CRO and Robin as General Counsel, I am proud to add experienced all-stars to an already stellar leadership team,” Cirne added in the press release.

In a New Relic blog post on the news, Cirne said he has known Friar from when he used to hang out at Stanford Business School where Sarah and board chairman Peter Fenton were classmates 15 years ago.

“Not many people on the planet have the relevant, high-scale, hands-on experience with finance, engineering, and operations that Sarah has,” Cirne said in the blog post.

Photo by  National Retail Federation / Flickr.

Do you think younger startups are more open to diversity than established technology companies?

BMikelPhotoSquareBetsy Mikel is a freelance copywriter and content strategist who helps brands, businesses and entrepreneurs tell their stories. A journalist at heart, her curiosity drives her to find something new to learn every single day. Follow her on Twitter at @betsym.

 

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