Welcoming New Leaders Leyla Seka and Helen Wang

Seven years ago this month, I left my corporate law job at Fenwick and West to start Ironclad out of my Potrero Hills apartment. What had started out as a project to automate my own manual work on contracts had grown into something else: a nagging conviction that my problem with contracts was actually a universal problem in the business world, and that if you could just get the right group of people together to work on it, you might just have a shot at solving it.

Seven years later, we’ve got nearly 300 people working together to solve the problem of contracting. We call ourselves Cladiators, and we are the right people. We’ve proven it this past year, when, against a backdrop of COVID, racial and political tumult, and environmental catastrophes, we have nevertheless managed to come together to do some of our best work. 

We experienced record growth, with 170% increase in new customers joining the Ironclad family, including Snap, Novotech, and Zapier, a 200% increase in active users on the platform, and a doubling of our employee base. This was also the year that we were recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management for All Contracts, Q1 2021.

We acquired our first company, PactSafe, in March of this year, and six months later launched Ironclad Clickwrap, making Ironclad the first digital contracting platform on the market that brings the power of clickwrap to contract lifecycle management.

And this month, our company readies itself for an inflection point, with the addition of two remarkable leaders to our executive ranks: Leyla Seka and Helen Wang. Leyla will be our Chief Operating Officer. Previously, she was a partner at Operator Collective, a women-led venture capital firm dedicated to bringing diversity and inclusion to enterprise investing. Leyla brings with her over 20 years of experience in tech, including 12+ as a top Salesforce executive, where she built and scaled iconic products like the AppExchange, Desk.com, and Salesforce Mobile. She pioneered Salesforce’s equal pay initiative, which led to raises for more than 10% of the women at the company. She is also a co-founder of Black Venture Institute and on the board of directors of Girls Who Code. 

Helen will be joining as Chief Financial Officer. She brings over 16 years of experience growing businesses, most recently serving as CFO for eBay Global Payments where she helped scale eBay’s Managed Payments platform. She has deep expertise in M&A, leading corporate development teams at both eBay and Rothschild, where she was a Vice President of M&A. She graduated from Harvard Business School as a George F. Baker Scholar in the top 5% of students. 

Helen and Leyla round out the most talented and experienced executive team in the game, and ready the company for our greatest inflection point yet. 

Over the last seven years, we built the best team in the game; in the next seven, we’ll power the world’s contracts. Our vision is huge, and we’ve only executed a tiny fraction of it. Onwards.