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Jennifer Gazza
Entrepreneur and CEO of Buffer
Jennifer Gazza is a successful entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as CEO of the social media management platform Buffer. She has a diverse educational background, having studied human relations at Carnegie Institute, and pursuing master's degrees in engineering at the University of Warwick-WMG. Gazza is an avid surfer, skier, and mountain biker who values living life on her own terms. Additionally, she is an active supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.
With her expertise in business and leadership, Gazza has overseen the growth of Buffer's successful platform, which helps businesses optimize their social media presence. She demonstrates the importance of following one's passions and carving out a unique path in life.
Highlights
Today is a special day at Buffer - we just crossed $20M in ARR 🎉🚀
What makes this extra special for all of us, is that this is the second time we've reached this milestone. This has been a years-long whole-team effort to turn a decline back around to growth and thriving. It has been hard-earned and we've been through a lot to get back to this place.
34 people in our 73 person team were around when we first hit $20M in ARR back in early 2019. It means the world to me that so many people stuck with Buffer through some of the toughest years we've experienced. I'm proud of the fact that we stayed true to our values, and had optimism and conviction that we'd figure it out.
And we've achieved $20M more efficiently this time around - last time we were 86 people which translated to $234K revenue per employee. This time we're 73 people and are achieving $274K revenue per employee.
Almost everyone on the team today has been part of the Buffer journey of decline and back to growth. I think this is going to serve us very well going forward. We know the pain of losing momentum, how deviating from our original purpose of serving entrepreneurs and small businesses led us astray, and we know how much we can achieve when we make bold thoughtful steps alongside achieving strong consistent output.
A fun fact about this milestone:
- It took us 7 months to go from $18M to $19M
- It took us just 4 months to go from $19M to $20M
I'm delighted that not only are we back to growth and profitability, but our growth rate is currently accelerating. We're committed to keeping up the diligence and the pace we've established, as it is going to give us more resources to invest in making Buffer even more useful.
I enjoyed being on The Startup CEO Show with @markmacleod_ to chat building @buffer.
Topics we covered: transparency as a core value, taking a long-term view, buying out investors, navigating a co-founder breakup, working through revenue decline back to growth, fatherhood.
Links to listen/watch in next post ⬇️
