Fri, 14:12: PCC COMMUNITY MARKETS NAMES KRISHNAN SRINIVASAN NEW PRESIDENT & CEO
Pretty big news at PCC today. Not only is this our first CEO who is a person of color, but he's South Asian—so of course I immediately had to tell Shobhit about it. Shobhit immediately noted how many huge tech companies (Google, Microsoft) currently have South Asian CEOs. As I noted, though, a local co-op chain of natural foods grocery stores is pretty different from such companies.
Much more notable, though, is the fact that this was an internal candidate. I'll have 20 years at PCC this year, and none of the three previous CEOs we've had in that time (excluding interim CEOs we had briefly between them) were hired from within. Our most recent two CEOs were both polarizing in large part because they were external candidates coming direct from huge corporations (one from Starbucks, the other from Kroger) with limited knowledge of PCC culture and history.
To be fair, Krish himself has an employment history with huge corporations too, including Lyft, Amazon and Microsoft. But it's still a huge difference that he isn't coming *direct* from any of those places—he's already a PCC employee. Time will tell how well he works out in this new role, but the fact that he's already been our CFO for 3 years, and has been a member-shopper for over twenty years, puts him far ahead of any other new CEO hire we've had in over two decades. If nothing else, he seems to understand what PCC means to its shoppers and its employees, which engenders more hope for the person in this position than we've had in a long time.
