The next chapter
By: Yan-David Erlich
Tags: Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Startup

After 4.5 years as Parsable’s CEO, I’m passing the baton. I’m excited to announce that Lawrence Whittle — formerly our Chief Revenue Officer — is Parsable’s next CEO.

When Ryan, Chase, and I founded Parsable, we had a vision to empower industrial workers globally to get their jobs done right, every time by replacing legacy paper-based workflows with a modern collaboration & workflow platform designed from the ground up for industrial work.

We discovered early on that, while industrial firms had widely adopted digital collaboration technology in their back offices, their field and factory workers still do their jobs with the same error-prone tools they used in the 1950s: clipboards, sharpies, and walkie-talkies. Globally connected supply chains, higher quality standards, and tighter margins mean companies are eager to help their operations teams work safer and be more productive.

Today our vision is becoming reality. We are deployed at category-leading Global Fortune 500 companies across a wide berth of industries: from Unilever in CPG to Schlumberger in Oil & Gas. We are recognized by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum as being a critical engine of transformation for Industry 4.0. We are backed by a consortium of Silicon Valley’s top venture firms and the venture arms of some of the world’s largest industrial companies. And we’re just getting started.

I’m proudest of the team and culture that we’ve built. With offices in 5 cities — and customers in close to 60 countries — we’ve retained the same drive and purpose of mission we had back when we all fit in a small conference room.

Since joining us as CRO, Lawrence has been instrumental in assembling our customer facing teams, driving our marketing efforts, and forging strong relationships with our ecosystem. As Parsable scales to meet its massive market opportunity, there’s no better person to take the company forward. I’ll remain involved as an advisor to the company.

What’s next

As to my next chapter, I want to finally focus my full energies on my love of helping early stage companies succeed. While I’ve been a operator and founder as my “full time job” the past 20 years, I’ve scaled up my advising and investing activities over the last decade. Starting with small angel checks and scaling to deploying millions of dollars of capital, I’ve been fortunate to have been among the earliest investors in, and advisor to, category-defining companies including Mixer Labs, Thumbtack, CircleUp, Rocksbox, Howdy.ai, and MasterClass.

Many of my happiest moments have been watching these entrepreneurs succeed, and some of my proudest have been when these talented founders still call me for advice — even after having raised follow-on rounds from incredible investors at First Round, Sequoia, Accel, Matrix, NEA, and more.

I’m still figuring out what form this investing activity will take, whether I’ll join an existing venture firm or start my own, but I’m thrilled for the next chapter. In the meantime, I’m going to spend some time relaxing with my badass wife, travel a bit, and continue doing what I love: cheering for Parsable’s success and working my ass off to make the next crop of entrepreneurs succeed. If you’re such an entrepreneur, I’d love to meet you.

Onwards.