Blues announced that former Evernote CEO Ian Small has joined the company as CEO. Small, who has more than 30 years of technology-industry experience, brings deep operational expertise and a track record of scaling companies from early-stage through public-market maturity.
Small is widely recognised as an end-to-end operator with the ability to drive growth across every stage of the business lifecycle. He brings with him a standout reputation for listening to customers and turning their needs into innovation. Small’s experience spans a broad range of technology companies, from nimble startups to large-scale public enterprises, making him uniquely suited to guide Blues through its next phase of expansion.
This announcement follows Blues’ recent closing of $25 million in additional funding led by Sequoia Capital and fuelled by strong demand from large enterprise customers, many of whom are expanding their use of Blues as they scale their businesses.
“I founded Blues because of a deeply held belief that all the world’s physical products would become connected and intelligent. Since 2020 we’ve been helping enterprises to do just that – transforming their businesses from products to intelligent services,” said Ray Ozzie, Founder and Executive Chair of Blues. “We’ve reached a phase where our growth calls for a strong operational leader who can help us unlock our full potential by scaling the business. I look forward to working closely with Ian to take Blues to the next level.”
Blues is empowering established industries to reinvent themselves through intelligent, Cloud-connected products, while also allowing emerging businesses to create entirely new markets. From industrial manufacturing and logistics to the energy sector, Blues addresses the most complex challenges of IoT connectivity, making it simple and secure to bring any physical product online.
“My early conversations with customers proved to be incredibly inspiring, ultimately cementing my decision to join Blues,” said Ian Small, CEO of Blues. “On every call, customers shared their excitement about driving revenue or profitability with their new intelligent services, all made possible by tapping the data previously locked inside their products.
“Blues makes it dramatically easier and more affordable to derive actionable insights from physical products, accelerating the time to market for new services. We’re driving a long-overdue platform shift by putting these capabilities within reach of every product maker, not just those with big R&D budgets. I’m excited to help Ray, the team, our customers, and partners accelerate the shift.”
Small has most recently served as CEO of Evernote (2018-2023), Global Chief Data Officer at Telefónica (2013-2016), and currently serves on the board of directors of Lumentum, a manufacturer of optical and photonic products, and Snapdocs, a digital mortgage closing provider. He also currently serves as an advisor to Squint, which provides a manufacturing intelligence platform to Fortune 500 enterprises, and has previously served as an advisor to Loon, a graduate of Google’s X Labs, as well as to Alpha, Telefónica’s long-term innovation/moonshot unit.
Small began his Silicon Valley career in 1989 as a research scientist and senior engineer at Apple, where he led several advanced product and research teams within the Human Interface Group and was responsible for engineering management and product release of QuickTime VR.
Small earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science and his master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and is a holder of 9 US patents.
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