Nearly 14 years since its founding, Tableau Software (NYSE: [[ticker:DATA]]) is going through a major leadership transition. Co-founder and CEO Christian Chabot is handing over the top job at the Seattle company to Adam Selipsky, an Amazon Web Services executive.
Chabot, who co-founded and built the data visualization and analytics company with Stanford colleagues Chris Stolte and Pat Hanrahan, piloting it through a 2013 IPO and rapid expansion in recent years, will remain chairman of the Tableau board of directors.
Selipsky’s title at AWS was vice president of marketing, sales, and support—a chief operating officer role, according to his LinkedIn profile. Selipsky helped AWS grow from no revenue to become the leading cloud computing platform, generating more than $10 billion a year. He joined Amazon in 2005 after an executive posting at RealNetworks. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School; his undergraduate degree is also from Harvard.
Here’s an Xconomy dispatch from a 2009 event in which Selipsky recounted the early days of AWS.
The leadership change installing Selipsky (pictured above at right) as president and CEO takes effect Sept. 16. Chabot intends to remain actively involved, focusing on “long-term strategy and customer evangelism,” Tableau says. Other changes announced by the Seattle-based company Monday:
—Stolte is being replaced as chief development officer by Andrew Beers. Stolte will be a technical advisor to the company.
—Francois Ajenstat was promoted to a new role, chief product officer.
Wall Street investors bid down Tableau’s shares by more than 50 percent over a few days in early February after the company reported a large net loss for 2015. Shares in the company were up 13 percent in early afternoon trading Tuesday to more than $62 a share, giving the company a market cap of about $4.63 billion.
