Person attributes
As Chief Executive Officer, Yancey drives the overall strategy and direction for DigitalOcean to lead the company through its next phase of growth. He brings of technical, financial and leadership experience and spent the last 15 years in senior executive roles at technology companies including SendGrid and DigitalGlobe.
Yancey started his career working as an manufacturing engineer at Corning Incorporated and The Clorox Company. He also has investment banking experience and spent a number of years focused on mergers and acquisitions. During his career, he has advised nearly $50 billion of M&A and $4 billion in equity and debt raising transactions. He has also served on several Boards of Directors and has advised CEOs on strategic and operational issues.
Most recently, Yancey was Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at SendGrid (NYSE:SEND) from 2015 to 2019, where he profitably grew revenue from $50 million to over $170 million and nearly tripled the company’s customer base. He also helped guide the company through its $150 million IPO in late 2017 and its sale in early 2019 to Twilio (NYSE:TWLO) for $3 billion in an all-stock transaction. Yancey’s experience at SendGrid provided significant insight on serving the needs of developers, which he will bring to DigitalOcean’s community of 4 million developers.
Prior to SendGrid, Yancey was CFO at DigitalGlobe (NYSE:DGI) for 10 years, where he helped grow the company’s revenue by 13x to more than $670 million and nearly $275 million in EBITDA. He also guided the company through its successful IPO in 2009.
Yancey currently serves on the boards of Allscripts Healthcare Solutions (NSDQ:MDRX), Zayo Group Holdings (NYSE:ZAYO) and Ping Identity Corporation. He holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Master of Business Administration from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
