Company | Leadership
The leadership team
The Motive leadership team is committed to building a company that creates products customers love and fostering a culture that enables people to do their best work. Get to know them below.
Executive Team
Shoaib Makani
Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder
Shoaib founded Motive with the belief that connectivity and automation could unlock the potential of businesses that power the physical economy. Prior to founding Motive, Shoaib worked at Khosla Ventures, where he led investments in consumer and enterprise technology companies. Prior to joining Khosla Ventures, Shoaib led international growth for AdMob. Shoaib started his career at Google, focused on product management and marketing. He holds a BSc in Government and Economics from The London School of Economics.
Siva Gurumurthy
Chief Technology Officer
Siva leads all software and hardware engineering at Motive. Prior to joining Motive, Siva worked as Director of Engineering at Twitter, where he led a team of 200 people responsible for developing and maintaining the company’s consumer-facing product. Before joining Twitter, he spent time at Yahoo Labs and IBM Research pioneering work on machine learning, real-time search, and graph analysis. He was an Edelman Laureate in 2014. Siva earned his Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, and completed his Masters in Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Jairam Ranganathan
Chief Product Officer
Jai leads product management, design, data science, and strategy for Motive. Prior to joining Motive, Jai worked at Uber, where he served as Senior Director of Product and Data Science, managing machine learning and AI, data, marketing systems, and operations tooling. Prior to joining Uber, Jai served as Senior Director of Product Management at Cloudera. He earned his BS and BA in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin and completed his MS in Computer Science at Stanford University.
Chirag Shah
Chief Financial Officer
Chirag oversees Motive’s finance functions, including controllership, financial planning and analysis, and strategic finance. Prior to Motive, he served as CFO at Kong, a software company specializing in platforms and cloud services for managing APIs. Before Kong, Chirag was CFO at Cornerstone OnDemand, where he led its successful IPO and its take-private sales transaction to Clearlake Capital. He started his career as an investment banker focused on mergers, acquisitions, and restructurings. Chirag earned his Bachelor of Science in Finance from Georgetown University and completed his Master of Business Administration at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Patrick Richards
Chief Information Officer
Patrick leads all Business Technology for Motive, including IT, enterprise systems, business intelligence, and information security. Prior to Motive, Patrick was Director of Product Management at Tableau Software, responsible for the company’s customer lifecycle (lead-to-cash) and digital transformations. Before joining Tableau, he served as Head of Partner Integrations at Amazon, leading a team responsible for partnerships with media giants like Disney and the NFL. Patrick earned his BS at the University of Wisconsin Madison and his MS in Information Strategy at Columbia University.
Adam Block
Chief Revenue Officer
Adam oversees Motive’s global Revenue and Go-To-Market functions, including sales, business development, strategy, operations, sales engineering, and partnerships. Prior to Motive, he served as Vice President over the Public Sector, Healthcare, Manufacturing, High Tech, and Life Sciences teams at Medallia, the leading enterprise experience platform. During his tenure, Medallia went public and was later acquired for $6.4B. Before Medallia, Adam was Vice President, Sales and Marketing for TenMast software (now MRI software) and previously served as Partner and Vice President of Sales at Zeta Marketing, an internet marketing startup. Adam earned his Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in Finance and Management from the University of Kentucky.
Robson Grieve
Chief Marketing Officer
Robson is the Chief Marketing Officer for Motive. In his 20-plus year career, he has held senior positions across all aspects of marketing in fast-growth SaaS and cloud leaders, most recently as CMO of European Low Code pioneer OutSystems. Prior to that, he was CMO at Pure Storage and New Relic; and Executive Vice President of Marketing and Customer Experience at Concur, which was acquired by SAP in 2014. Robson holds a BA from Ontario’s Queen’s University.
Ryan Plutnicki
Chief Customer Officer
Ryan has direct responsibility over the customer success, support, onboarding, and professional services teams at Motive. Prior to joining Motive, he served as Chief Customer Officer at Emburse, an expense management and AP automation solution provider. He has 20 years of experience at SAP building and leading high-performing teams to profitable growth. He also boasts expertise in company card spend control, and is proficient with scaling operational excellence across global service centers. Ryan has served customers of all sizes, from SMB to enterprise.
Shulamite White
Chief Legal Officer and Head of People
Shu leads legal and compliance at Motive. Prior to joining Motive, she was SVP, General Counsel at Imperva, a leading cybersecurity software and SaaS company acquired by Thoma Bravo for $2.1B in 2019. Prior to joining Imperva, Shu spent nine years at Fenwick & West counseling technology companies on equity and debt offerings, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate compliance and governance. Her clients included Imperva, Shutterfly, Chegg, Fortinet, Concur, Responsys, and Successfactors. Shu earned her J.D. from UC Hastings College of the Law and a BA from New York University.
Board of Directors
Nina Achadijan
Index Ventures
Nina joined Index in 2017 and leads investments in enterprise SaaS, vertical SaaS, and AI, from seed to pre-IPO stages. She sits on the boards of ServiceTitan, CodeSignal, DeepScribe, Motive, Persona, Seso, Shopmonkey, and many others. Prior to joining Index, Nina was an FP&A Lead for Google’s AdSense team and started her career as a credit trader on Wall Street. She also started HIVE Ventures, the first seed venture fund focusing on Armenian entrepreneurs, where she invested in over 30 companies. Nina is a graduate of Harvard University with a BA in Government and is a recipient of the Michael C. Rockefeller Scholarship. She lives in San Francisco and in her free time, she enjoys watching football and Formula 1.
Dana Evan
Independent
From 2013 to July 2020, Ms. Evan served as a Venture Partner at Icon Ventures, a venture capital firm, and since July 2007 has invested in and served on the boards of directors of companies in the internet, technology and media sectors. Ms. Evan served as Chief Financial Officer of VeriSign, Inc. – a provider of intelligent infrastructure services for the internet and telecommunications network – from 1996 to 2007.
She serves on the boards of directors of Domo, Inc., a business intelligence tools and data visualization company, since May 2018; Farfetch Limited, a global technology platform for the luxury fashion industry, since April 2015; Proofpoint, Inc., a security-as-a-service provider which recently entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Thoma Bravo for $12.3 billion in a transaction expected to close in the third quarter of 2021, since June 2008; and Momentive Global Inc. (formerly SVMK Inc. or SurveyMonkey), an online survey development cloud-based software, since March 2012. She previously served as director of Criteo S.A., a performance display advertising company, from March 2013 until June 2017; Fusion-io, Inc., a flash memory technology company, until it was acquired by SanDisk Corporation in July 2014; Omniture, Inc., an online marketing and web analytics company, until it was acquired by Adobe Systems Incorporated in October 2009; and Everyday Health, Inc., a provider of digital health and wellness solutions, until it was acquired by Ziff Davis, LLC in December 2016.
Ms. Evan holds a B.S. in Commerce from Santa Clara University and is a certified public accountant (inactive).
Shoaib Makani
Motive
Shoaib founded Motive with the belief that connectivity and automation could unlock the potential of businesses that power the physical economy. Prior to founding Motive, Shoaib worked at Khosla Ventures, where he led investments in consumer and enterprise technology companies. Prior to joining Khosla Ventures, Shoaib led international growth for AdMob. Shoaib started his career at Google, focused on product management and marketing. He holds a BSc in Government and Economics from The London School of Economics.
Obaid Khan
Independent
As the co-founder and former Chief Operating Officer at Motive, Obaid now serves as a board member. Prior to founding Motive, Obaid worked in legislative affairs for a Washington DC-based nonprofit. He earned his BA from the University of California, San Diego.
Somesh Dash
IVP
Somesh Dash is a general partner at IVP and joined the firm in 2005. Somesh invests in companies on the path to rapid growth within Consumer, Digital Health, Cybersecurity and Enterprise Software. Over the course of his nearly 20 years of investing, Somesh has supported companies through IPO and beyond. Some of his highlights include Amplitude, Insider, Discord, Pindrop, Thrive, and Uber. Somesh serves as a Board Director or Observer for IVP portfolio companies, H1, Hello Heart, Lyra Health, Pindrop, Rubrik, and Thrive Global.
Alexander Niehenke
Scale Ventures
Alex joined Scale in 2013 as a Principal, responsible for sourcing investments in DroneDeploy and Forter. A Partner since 2017, Alex has focused on early investments in vertical software markets where incumbents have failed to invest in advanced technology offerings. That thesis has led to investments in Motive (2017), Root Insurance (2018), Scout RFP (2019), Proxy (2020), Spruce (2020), Proscia (2020), and Archipelago (2021). Motive has been one of the fastest growing SaaS companies of all time. Scout RFP was acquired by Workday in late 2019 for $540M, and Root completed its IPO in late 2020.
Alex sits on the Board of Directors at Motive, Proxy, Spruce, Proscia, and Archipelago. He has written about SaaS in TechCrunch and been profiled by Business Insider, Forbes, and Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Aaron Schildkrout
Investor
Aaron is an independent Board member at Motive and has been involved with the company since 2018. He is a founding investment team member at Addition. He previously ran Growth, Data, and Driver and Rider product at Uber, and before that was a founder/CEO of HowAboutWe (acquired by IAC). He has been an advisor to or investor in many high growth companies including Noom, Ramp, Chainalysis, Brightwheel, Zap, and The New York Times. He lives in New York City with his wife (also a Founder/CEO) and daughter.
