DreamHost announced that Simon Anderson has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. Anderson is the first non-Founder to fill the CEO role in the company’s thirteen year history and is tasked with providing leadership, vision and strategy to further accelerate the company’s growth. Dreamhost (www.dreamhost.com), a leading global web hosting and cloud services provider, is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with operations in Brea, and San Francisco, California. The Company was founded by four computer sciences undergraduates from Harvey Mudd College in the late 90s and has since built an international client base approaching 300,000 customers with over 1,000,000 domains hosted – with zero outside capital or debt. They are laser focused in the Consumer and SMB sectors, but with their CEPH open source storage system coming online, they have plans to expand to the Enterprise in the near term.
Anderson brings deep experience in building web platform and application businesses, most recently serving as the Chief Marketing Officer at Pictage, Inc. a venture backed leading platform for professional photographers where he was responsible for sales, marketing, business development and strategy. During his tenure at Pictage, Anderson led the development and launch of new marketing solutions that resulted in doubling the customer base in just 18 months. He was also responsible for expanding the company’s services through key acquisitions, joint ventures and partnerships. Previously, Anderson served as the Senior Vice President of Business Development and Strategy at BiggerBoat, and then Vice President of Marketing at Authenticlick.
Prior to this, Simon was the Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for Affinity Internet, Inc., a leading consumer and SMB focused hosting services provider. During his 5 year tenure, the firm grew from a rough startup to over $65M in revenues, and was eventually acquired by Hostway. Earlier in his career, he was a General Partner at Allen & Buckeridge, a leading Australian based venture capital fund. Anderson earned his Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Law degrees at Australian National University. He also holds a Graduate diploma in Applied Finance and Investment from the Securities Institute in Sydney, Australia.
As the first full time CEO in the DreamHost’s history, Taylor Winfield was charged with finding an experienced and visionary executive who would lead the company into its next evolutionary phase while embracing and retaining the democratic culture of the company. Anderson’s proven track record coupled with his dynamic and enthusiastic leadership skills is a perfect fit for DreamHost.