Welcoming Karyn Smith: Snyk’s new Chief Legal Officer

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Karyn Smith has joined Snyk as our new Chief Legal Officer. As she embraces this new career adventure, Karyn draws from the deep well of experience that has formed her impressive legal career to date. She will consistently deliver phenomenal support to the full business by providing indispensable legal counsel and business advice during this next monumental period in Snyk’s growth journey.

A resident of Washington, D.C., Karyn joins us from Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), a cloud communications platform company, where she served as its General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Corporate Secretary since 2014. During her tenure, Karyn successfully built Twilio’s legal function from a team of one to more than 140 attorneys and legal professionals. Led by Karyn, this team directly supported Twilio’s global expansion and rapid growth (from less than $100M in ARR in 2014 to nearly $3B in 2021) as well as its path to becoming a public company in 2016.

Prior to her impactful time with Twilio, Karyn was Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA), an online game company, where she oversaw all corporate matters and led the company through its $1B IPO in 2011. Prior to Zynga, Karyn was a partner at Cooley LLP, an AmLaw 100 firm, where she represented emerging growth companies at all stages of growth, guiding dozens of companies through public offerings.

It was obvious to me from our first meeting that Karyn already embodies Snyk’s all-important Care Deeply value, leading with both passion and compassion for her colleagues and customers, as well as her larger community and our shared planet. Notably, she currently serves on the Board of Halcyon, a D.C.-based incubator focused on accelerating the impact-driven future of business and is also a founding member of Chief, a network focused on connecting and supporting women executive leaders. I know I speak on behalf of the entire Snyk Leadership Team when I say that we look forward to working with Karyn in order to continue to grow the reach of Snyk Impact, as well as help Snyk to recruit and retain more talented female leaders in 2022 and well beyond.

Finally, I also wanted to share that as part of this transition, Stephanie Dominy, who has successfully served as our General Counsel since 2018, will also be taking on a new challenge as Vice President of Legal Operations and Special Projects. Stephanie is a valued veteran Snyker, responsible for building the foundation that Karyn, along with our entire talented legal team, will continue to build upon in 2022. In her new role, Stephanie will now oversee legal strategy for ongoing strategic initiatives and further build out our legal operations function.

Please join me in welcoming Karyn to the global Snyk team and congratulating both her and Stephanie on their exciting new roles!

Karyn and Stephanie, along with all of Snyk’s teams worldwide, are currently growing their teams as we help millions of developers worldwide to continue their pace of innovation securely. If you're as excited about our developer security mission as we are, take a look at our Jobs at Snyk page and reach out today.