You should know the new CEO of this software company
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Christa Quarles, the former CEO of OpenTable, has been named CEO of Corel, the Canadian software company whose best-known brand might be the long ago word-processing program WordPerfect.
It’s okay if you have only a foggy recollection of Corel. It’s a good example of how tough it is to kill a software company. Over the years it has gone public and private twice. It has done multiple acquisitions to try to bulk up. And now it is owned by private-equity shop KKR, whichbought it last year from another PE firm, as PE firms are wont to do.
It isn’t okay if you don’t know Quarles. She ran OpenTable, which is part of Booking.com. She did a stint at NextDoor, had a run at Disney (which bought the gaming company where she was chief financial officer at the time), and back in the day she was a research analyst. Oh, and last year, when we still gathered in person for events, she was the non-editorial co-chair ofFortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo.
Quarles, who is 46, says she sees an almost “patriotic” opportunity to sell to the types of small businesses and “pro-sumer” customers that are Corel’s base. “We did this at OpenTable too,” she says. The company owns a handful of products that compete comfortably against or adjacent to software giants. CorelDraw is a less-famous alternative to theAdobe Creative Suite. MindManager does data visualization and project management. Parallels is a program that lets Mac and Chromebook users run Windows if they must.
The new CEO has a mandate to make acquisitions. She says she’ll focus on ensuring the company’s offerings fit together as a platform and building on the desktop collaboration trend. KKR brought her in, and John Park, the lead investor on the deal, envisions Quarles overseeing “bigger and bolder deals.” Already, he says, the company has played runner-up on transactions that were many times its previous deal size.
On a personal note, I’m in the unusual position of writing about an executive I’ve been able to watch in action as a high-value member of a team I help lead. Quarles has one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios I’ve ever seen, equally passionate about her dog as she is about the latest buzz in business.
Good luck, Christa.
Adam Lashinsky
This edition of Data Sheet was curated byAaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
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Today I feel I've sprung a leak. A former finance manager inAmazon's tax department was building spreadsheets, calculating taxes, and, oh,tipping off members of her family to Amazon's earnings results. Laksha Bohra and her family agreed to repay $1.5 million of illegal gains plus interest and a penalty of $1.1 million. Speaking of catching crooks, theInternal Revenue Service suspects people are avoiding taxes by transacting in cryptocurrencies. So next year's Form 1040 will havea prominent new question: At any time during 2020 did you receive, sell, send, exchange or otherwise acquire any financial interest in any virtual currency?
There is no bottom, chapter 4,874. The U.K.'s Channel 4 got a hold of a database fromCambridge Analytica that the Trump campaign used to targetFacebook ads in 2016. The database reveals that the campaigndisproportionately categorized Black voters with the label "deterrence" and showed them ads to discourage them from voting.
Gone phishing. Hospital chainUniversal Health Services was hit with a massive cyberattack thatforced its computers offline. Staff had to take notes on paper and could not access electronic records. Elsewhere, hackersreleased personal information about students inClark County, Nevada, including addresses and social security numbers. The district reportedly refused to pay a ransom after hackers penetrated its servers.
Know when to fold 'em. In gadget land,Lenovo's folding laptop, dubbed the Thinkpad X1 Fold, isnow available for preorder starting at $2,500. The device has a 13-inch screen that folds down the middle and a removable Bluetooth keyboard. Also,Google offered EU antitrust regulators additional (though undisclosed) concessionsto get approval for itsFitbit acquisition. The EU is scheduled to decide on the deal by year-end.
King of IPO island. On the stock market, it will be anotherbusy week of initial public offerings, includingAsana andPalantir. Cybersecurity firmMcAfee, sold byIntel to private equity in 2016,filed to go public, too. The company had a net income of $31 million on revenue of $1.4 billion in the first half of the year.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Some entries in the category of "food for thought" provide more mental sustenance than others. Author Nicholas Carr's essay will definitely get your brain engaged. Just think about the title:What is it like to be a smartphone?
What is it like to be a smartphone? In all the chatter about the future of artificial intelligence, the question has been glossed over or, worse, treated as settled. The longstanding assumption, a reflection of the anthropomorphic romanticism of computer scientists, science fiction writers, and internet entrepreneurs, has been that a self-aware computer would have a mind, and hence a consciousness, similar to our own. We, supreme programmers, would create machine consciousness in our own image. The assumption is absurd.
ON THE MOVE
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BEFORE YOU GO
Whether the new home-security drone from Amazon's Ring unit turns out to be great or not, it's certainly livened up the gadget conversation.Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler solicited nicknames for the drone on Twitterand got back quite a few suggestions. I liked iNarc and Elf on a Shelf but those LoTR fanboys at Palantir probably prefer Fly of Sauron.
Aaron Pressman
