SAN FRANCISCO — The 47-year-old CEO of the mid-stage B2B analytics platform Verselight took the stage at the company’s Q4 all-hands meeting Wednesday morning, opened his prepared remarks with what he described afterward as “a really vulnerable moment,” and defecated audibly and visibly in front of approximately 340 employees.
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The chief executive, who had been working with an executive coach for eleven weeks on what she’d described as “softening his edges” and “showing up more human,” said the incident was the direct result of specific feedback from their most recent session.
“She told me to be more self-deprecating,” he said Thursday, from a hotel across town. “She said, quote, let them see you not have it together. Let them see you be small. I took that to heart. I wanted to give them something real. I made a choice.”
He paused.
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“In hindsight,” he added, “I may have overshot.”
The all-hands, scheduled to cover Q4 earnings, a strategic roadmap update, and the announcement of a new head of product, opened at 10:03 a.m. He walked onstage in his usual dark jeans and untucked button-down, took the wireless microphone from the presentation coordinator, looked out at the assembled employees with what several described later as “an unusual calm,” and said the following:
“Team. Before we get into the numbers today, I want to try something different.”
He paused for effect.
“I want to show you that I’m just a guy.”
Several people in the front row would later report thinking he was about to share a story from his childhood.
He was not about to share a story from his childhood.
What followed, according to seventeen separate first-hand accounts, was approximately eleven seconds of complete silence in the room, followed by a visible physical adjustment on the CEO’s part, followed by the sound, and then the smell, and then the dawning realization across the audience, in expanding concentric waves, of what had just occurred onstage.
He then, sources confirmed, continued with his prepared remarks.
“That was for you,” he said quietly into the microphone. “That was me. That was me actually. This is what humility looks like. This is what showing up looks like. I am not above you. I am with you.”
He then began, according to the slide deck later obtained by reporters, a fourteen-slide presentation on ARR growth.
The presentation continued for approximately twenty-two minutes, during which he made no acknowledgment of what had happened, took no break, and did not leave the stage. Several employees in the first three rows quietly relocated to the back of the room. The head of HR, a nine-year veteran of the compliance function, was observed to be, quote, “typing very quickly on her phone.”
Two members of the executive team, sources confirmed, walked out.
The head of product announcement went, per attendees, “well.”
The executive coach, when reached for comment Thursday afternoon, was audibly upset.
“That is not what I meant,” she said. “That is categorically not what I meant. When I said be more human, I meant, like, mention that your kid threw up on you last weekend. I meant tell a story where you were bad at something. I did not mean — I want to be very clear that I did not mean — I did not mean literally shit yourself in front of the entire company.“
She paused.
“I am going to have to rebuild my entire practice around this,” she added.
The Verselight board convened an emergency meeting Wednesday evening. Sources close to the meeting confirmed that the CEO did not attend, that he was not asked to attend, and that at no point during the meeting did any board member describe what he had done using the actual word defecated, opting instead for a rotating cast of euphemisms including the incident, the moment, what happened at the all-hands, and, on one occasion, the choice.
By 11 p.m. Wednesday, sources confirmed, the board had voted to place him on administrative leave “pending a wellness evaluation.”
The CEO, when informed of this, expressed disappointment.
“They just don’t get it,” he said. “They asked me to be vulnerable. I was vulnerable. And now they’re punishing me for it. This is exactly the problem I’ve been trying to solve. This is why I hired a coach in the first place.”
He was asked whether he understood why the board might have responded the way it had.
He thought about it for a long time.
“No,” he said.
At press time, an internal Verselight Slack channel titled #general had been quietly renamed #general-2 by an employee whose account had, within four hours, been suspended by IT. The original #general channel remained accessible but had, sources confirmed, “a lot of GIFs in it.”
The recorded video of the all-hands, which had been streaming live to the company’s four regional offices, had been pulled from the internal video system by 12:47 p.m. Wednesday.
A copy, sources confirmed, has already made it to LinkedIn.
The coach has not, at press time, returned any additional calls.