SPMB Recruits Chief Marketing Officer for Ethos – Hunt Scanlon Media
March 7, 2022 – SPMB, an executive search firm that helps find transformative executives throughout Silicon Valley, has assisted in the placement of Sheila Vashee as chief marketing officer for Ethos, the largest term life insurance provider in the U.S. Partner Dean Nacey led the assignment. Ms. Vashee joins Ethos from early stage investing firm Basis Set Ventures. Prior to that she held high-profile roles at Opendoor and Dropbox. At Ethos, she will focus on building and scaling all marketing, growth, and brand efforts across B2B and consumer to support Ethos’ rapid growth.
“Congratulations, Peter Colis and the entire Ethos team on welcoming Sheila Joglekar Vashee as chief marketing officer,” said SPMB in an online statement. “On behalf of Dean Nacey and the rest of the SPMB Executive Search team, it was a pleasure to partner with you on this search and support the company’s growth as Ethos works to democratize access to life insurance. Here’s to a fantastic outcome and a world-class addition to the Ethos team!”
Mr. Colis, Ethos’ co-founder and CEO, said that the key role Ms. Vashee played in growing Opendoor and Dropbox impressed the team at Ethos. “We’re excited that she shares our enthusiasm about the market opportunity in front of Ethos as well as our commitment to protecting the next million families,” he said.
Strong Experience
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to join Ethos,” said Ms. Vashee. “I look for three main things when I’m joining a new company: size of the opportunity, strength of the team, and acuteness of the customer need. Ethos meets all of these and more; it’s the challenge I’ve been waiting for.”
As VP of marketing and growth at Opendoor, Ms. Vashee was responsible for marketing, growth operations, and agent partnerships across both sides of the buyer and seller marketplace, helping to take the company to more than 20 markets. Prior to Opendoor, she was the second marketing hire at Dropbox, where she was responsible for all new product launches, including the launch and growth of Dropbox Business and Dropbox Enterprise, as well as brand, product, social, events, and corporate marketing teams. In over five years, she helped grow the Dropbox user base to 600 million users and over $1 billion in revenue.
Ethos recently acquired Seattle start-up Tomorrow, which democratizes access to critical financial instruments for free, such as legal wills and trusts. The company has been growing at a significant rate and issued over $13 billion of life insurance coverage last year. In 2021, Ethos was valued at $2.7 billion after raising over $400 million from Sequoia Capital, Accel, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, GV, General Catalyst, and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. Revenue and users grew by more than 600 percent year-over-year in 2021.
Clearly signaling its focus on growth and scale, Ethos has significantly strengthened its executive bench recently, adding Anan Kashyap from Poshmark as CFO, Troy Thompson from Legal & General America as chief actuary, and industry veteran Marty Schafer as its first chief distribution officer, as well as promoting Vipul Sharma to chief technology officer and co-founder Lingke Wang to president.
Founded in 2016, Ethos describes itself as a technology company that makes it easier for everyone to protect their families with life insurance. The company’s advanced proprietary technology eliminates the traditional barriers to life insurance by developing instant and accessible products making it easy for people to acquire life insurance online, in minutes, without any medical exams. Ethos issues billions in coverage each month. Ethos is a global company, with offices in Austin, San Francisco, and Singapore, and team members in 35 states and four countries.
Achieving Scale
For over 40 years, SPMB has worked alongside its clients to build executive teams that ensure venture capital and private equity-backed game-changers achieve scale, and position multi-billion-dollar public companies to unlock innovation. Specializing in technology and innovation, SPMB recruits upper management and board members to growth-oriented companies in tech, consumer, and sustainability industries. SPMB has also placed dozens of senior executives at the portfolio companies of leading private equity firm partners including Blackstone, KKR, and TPG.
Mr. Nacey’s primary focus is creating long-term partnerships with B2B and B2C clients to foster comprehensive executive team build-outs at the board, CEO, and C-level. As an organization matures, he specializes in placing complementary general management, marketing, customer acquisition, revenue, go-to-market strategy / operations, and customer success leadership (CRO, CMO, COO, CCO) while also recruiting people leadership (CPO, CHRO, VPHR) that defines, encourages, and reinforces company-wide behaviors and systems to catalyze growth and achieve scale. Long-term clients include B2B companies Snyk, BetterUp, Juniper Square, Checkr, Front, Lob, ServiceNow, DocuSign, Dynatrace, Collective Health, and Tricentis, as well as B2C companies NerdWallet, Robinhood, Credit Karma, MyFitnessPal, Outdoorsy, and SoulCycle / Equinox.
Related: SPMB Assists Azul Systems in Chief Marketing Officer Search
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
