Gene Farrell

CEO

With over 25 years of executive leadership experience driving transformation and growth across the consumer and technology industries, Gene is a recognized thought leader and innovator known for building disruptive new businesses for global brands. 

Gene joined Vanilla as the company’s CEO in 2021 after four and a half years at Smartsheet, where he helped take the company public and scale the business from $100M to over $500M in revenue. As Smartsheet’s Chief Strategy and Product Officer, Gene was responsible for leading company strategy, corporate development, product management, product marketing, experience design, and strategic alliances.

Prior to Smartsheet, Gene spent five years at Amazon Web Services, where he served as vice president responsible for enterprise computing. In this role, Gene pioneered new cloud businesses including Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon Chime. Before Amazon, Gene was a vice president at the Coca-Cola Company, where he founded and led the creation of the Coca-Cola Freestyle beverage platform. His groundbreaking work on Coca-Cola Freestyle was recognized by Forbes as one of the best new products of the decade and received the Edison Gold Innovation and Catalyst Design awards.