Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, a former Google regional president, is all set to take the reins at New Zealand-based cloud accounting company Xero.
In a statement on LinkedIn, Ms Cassidy said: “I’m excited to be joining Xero as its next CEO… I’m humbled by the opportunity to work with Xeros around the world, the current CEO Steve Vamos and the leadership team, the board, and investors to further enable small businesses everywhere with powerful financial data and insights.”
David Thodey, Chair of Xero, said in a statement: “As we continue to focus on achieving our global ambitions, we’re delighted to appoint someone of Sukhinder’s calibre as CEO to lead Xero through our next phase of growth. Sukhinder’s appointment follows a rigorous global recruitment process where we considered a number of exceptional candidates.”
Ms Cassidy is an experienced Silicon Valley executive, with more than 25 years’ global leadership experience. She was the President, Asia Pacific & Latin America at Google; President at StubHub; founder of theBoardlist; founder of Joyus, where she was also the CEO; and co-founder of Yodlee.
Ms Cassidy was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1970 and her family moved to Ontario, Canada, when she was two years old. She graduated from the University of Western Ontario.
Ms Cassidy said that her father seeded and fueled her passion for entrepreneurship from a young age – “it all started with his ledger.”
She added: “Every year around March 1st, (beginning when I was 7 or 8), my father would gather our whole family around the dining room table, bring out his all checkbooks for the past year, and have us start recording every expense from our parents’ medical practice. As tax day grew near, the frenzied activity would accelerate – our army of family accountants working until the very last minute to figure out the year’s income, profits and taxes owed. By 12 or 13, I could do most of the tax return and by 18 I’d built an excel spreadsheet to speed up the system. But my view of entrepreneurship, and small business building was built line by line with each ledger entry of my youth.”
Ms Cassidy was appointed as the CEO of Xero following the resignation of chief executive Steve Vamos. Under Mr Vamos’ leadership, Xero has gone from 1.4 million subscribers to 3.5 million and from $NZ484.4 million in annualised monthly recurring revenue to $NZ1.5 billion.
Mr Vamos said in a LinkedIn post that “It’s been an enormous privilege to have served as Xero’s CEO, and I congratulate Sukhinder on her appointment.”
He added: “It is clear through the conversations we have had that we share similar views on the power of #human leadership and the importance of fostering a vibrant and diverse culture. As an experienced global tech executive, she is very well placed to take over the reins and lead Xero through this next exciting phase.”
Xero is one of the world’s largest online accounting platforms empowering SMBs and their advisors. Ms Cassidy will start at Xero on 28 November 2022 and work closely with Mr Vamos to manage the CEO transition till the end of May 2023.
