Silverchair recently announced a new capital partnership as well as the appointment of Will Schweitzer (previously Chief Product & Customer Success Officer) as President. Learn more about these developments in an interview between Marketing Director Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen and Will Schweitzer.

Give us the TL;DR version of Silverchair’s recent news.

If you haven’t seen or heard, last week Silverchair received a major growth investment from Thompson Street Capital Partners. We’re really excited about this because Thompson Street’s investment means that we’ll grow our products and services and that Silverchair can remain an independent, nonconflicted technology partner for associations, societies, and publishers in our space.

 

What made you select Thompson Street as our new investment partner? 

From our very first meeting with Thompson Street, we knew there was a high level of alignment with our culture and our values. Craig Albrecht and Joe St. Geme are phenomenal guys who appreciate science and scholarship, and Thompson Street has a lot of experience investing in very specialized software companies in niche markets and helping them grow. What’s been very rewarding is over the past two weeks Craig and Joe have joined both internal employee all-hands meetings and client community calls, and it’s very clear that they fit in. We’re very excited to have them as our newest Silverchairians.

 

Congrats on your appointment as the new President of Silverchair! What are your priorities as President over the next year?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my role has changed, going from Chief Product & Customer Success Officer to President, and the most important thing and where I want to focus my time initially is reinforcing our culture and values and our focus on our customers and partners. Our culture, our values, how we interact with our clients, how transparent and candid we try to be —it’s a major part of Silverchair’s success and I want to build on that.

Next, this investment is all about enabling our growth, so I’m really excited for our product extensions to support digital meeting content and professional medical education. We’re going to do a lot of work between now and the end of the year to fully introduce those products to the market in early 2023.

And last, I want to ensure that Silverchair remains a great place to work. Even though we’re a software company, it’s people who write the code, it’s people who interact with our clients, and without our people, we can’t help our publishers make money, save money, or fulfill their missions. And as we think about growing, it’s people who are going to maintain our culture and our values. So making Silverchair a great home for all our Silverchairians is one of my greatest priorities.

 

It’s clear from hearing you talk about Silverchair that you’re a Silverchair fanboy, so what would you say is your favorite aspect of SC?

I think I’m the Chief Fanboy at this point! My favorite thing about Silverchair is the people. It’s both our employees—from our senior leaders to the people who write code and answer client tickets—and our clients, who day after day give us a lot of feedback, a lot of ideas, a lot of inspiration for how we should improve our platform and services, what we should be doing with our investment, and how we should be growing our business. And it’s very energizing and very rewarding.

One of the things I’m really excited about is that the week of October 24th we’re convening all our Silverchair employees here in Charlottesville on the 24th and 25th, and then the following two days (the 26th and 27th) we’re bringing all of our clients to Charlottesville for a two-day meeting about where Silverchair is headed, and to have our clients meet with their teams. That’ll be a great week for us, and if you haven’t made your travel plans or registered for Silverchair Forum yet, please do.

 

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