Clint Sharp was wearing multiple hats.
In May 2024, the CEO and cofounder of data infrastructure unicorn Cribl took on a second job as interim chief revenue officer. Sharp said he stepped in to take the CRO job because, when Cribl didn’t meet its Q1 revenue goals, it was time to change direction. As the company searched for its next CRO, Sharp stepped into those shoes—or rather, that hat.
"We do, in fact, have a cowboy hat," Sharp told me over Zoom, which Cribl chief market officer Abby Strong confirmed.
"Oh, he’s put on the cowboy hat and walked into the room: 'Now, I’m CRO Clint,'" she laughed, gently mimicking what Sharp’s best Clint Eastwood might sound like.
The hat’s a great accessory, but it also gestures to a very real problem—balancing two roles is tricky, especially when one of those roles is as CEO. Sometimes it’s hard to signal what "hat" you’re wearing in each conversation. On its face, a CRO job is a weedsier gig than the CEO role, one that grapples with different pressures and daily questions. For Cribl, the problem was simple, though: The company had a $200 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) goal, one that looked far away last spring, as revenue leadership was in flux.
I asked Sharp why he wanted to give himself that second job. In part, it sounds like he was open to the learning experience and that it felt right, as the company searched for the right CRO. But I also think it’s a piece of character.
Once you’ve identified a problem, Sharp tells me, it doesn't just tend to improve as time passes. "It's best just to go straight at solving those problems," he said, adding: "I'm also always the person in the conference room where the screen or AV isn’t working, or people can’t get on the WiFi, and I’m crawling under the desk to help fix it."
Sharp’s cowboy stint seems to have done the trick. Though it may have seemed unlikely eight months ago, Cribl hit the goal it set at the beginning of last year, crossing $200 million in ARR, the company exclusively told Fortune. That marks ARR growth of about 70% year-over-year. Cribl, which was founded in 2018, hit its $100 million ARR milestone in 2023. The startup—whose investors include GV, GIC, CapitalG, IVP, and CRV—was last valued at $3.5 billion in its $319 million Series E, announced in August.
To get to $200 million, the company doubled down on constructing a well-staffed, well-structured sales operation. Sharp wrestled with questions like: "To grow by 70% to 80% this year, we have to have the right number of bodies sitting in the right places…How do we allocate territories? How do we hire the right number of reps? How do they have the right number of bosses?"
"Software's a people business," Sharp added.
Sharp’s five months as CRO was bolstered by the fact that it was a team effort. Strong picked up some CRO-related functions, as did the company’s head of finance: "We all banded together," Strong said. In the end, the company’s ARR growth also sprang from several spots, derived from both existing customers buying more products and from adding new customers. (The company says customers purchasing multiple Cribl products has increased 275% over the last year.) Cribl’s customer base now includes 43 members of the Fortune 100, as well as 130 members of the Fortune 500.
Cribl is among the unicorns many believe is en route to an IPO, so I asked Sharp about it directly.
"We will eventually be a public company," Sharp told Fortune. "I think there's no destination other than the public markets. At minimum, I’d say it’s two years away, so not near-term…We’re doing a lot of work internally to make sure we’re ready for a public offering, if market conditions get to the right spot."
In the meantime, Sharp’s back to wearing one (official) hat. New CRO Mike Pyle—previously of Salesforce’s Heroku and GitLab—joined Cribl in September. And Sharp shed his CRO-designated jacket, replacing it with his usual founder hoodie.
But I think he might still have that cowboy hat, somewhere.
ICYMI…OpenAI, SoftBank, and several other tech companies announced plans yesterday to invest as much as $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the U.S. The announcement, presided over by President Trump, included SoftBank CEO and chairman Masayoshi Son, Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The project, which dates back to 2024 and involves an initial $100 billion investment, is called Stargate—which immediately makes me think of the ’90s and aughts TV show about alien wormhole space travel. Read more here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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