Finance

WeWork continues executive buildout with Baker Hughes CFO

Kimberly Ross WeWork
Ross previously was the chief financial officer at Baker Hughes. WeWork
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WeWork poached the chief financial officer of a publicly-traded oil company to fill its vacant CFO role, the embattled office company said on Monday.

Kimberly Ross was previously CFO at Baker Hughes and at makeup company Avon, and she's on the boards of three publicly-traded companies. She will join WeWork on March 16.

Previously, Artie Minson was both CFO and president, before he became co-CEO in September after founder Adam Neumann was ousted.

New CEO Sandeep Mathrani started last month and has quickly moved to build out his executive team, naming a chief operating officer, chief product and experience officer, and chief communications officer in recent weeks.

Mathrani's executive team already looks more diverse than the nearly all-male group of C-suiters under founder Adam Neumann. WeWork was long criticized for lack of diversity, which chairman Marcelo Claure told employees he would address. 

WeWork still needs, among other roles, a chief technology officer and a global head of real estate. The company has also seen a number of recent departures, including its US president and its head of enterprise sales

Ross and many of the other new executives, including the CEO, have overseen publicly-traded companies, unlike much of WeWork's previous leadership team. The company shelved its initial public offering after a tumultuous autumn, but after it stabilizes, it may again look to tap the public markets.

Ross "has a wealth of experience managing corporate finance for leading global companies and positioning them to operate efficiently and with discipline in order to deliver on financial targets," Mathrani said in Monday's statement. "We will benefit from her expertise and leadership as we execute on our strategic operating plan and restore our growth trajectory."

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Meghan Morris
Meghan is the bureau chief in Singapore. She oversees business, lifestyle, and news coverage and leads the company's local hiring and editorial strategy.Singapore's bureau works on global news during Asia's daytime. They also collect tales from around the region about entrepreneurs, Big Tech work culture, FIRE, relocation, consumer trends, and AI, focused on people-centric storytelling.Before moving to Singapore in 2024, Meghan worked in NYC and SF as a senior correspondent, writing deeply-reported business investigations. If you have sensitive information, please email her from a nonwork email or reach out on secure messaging app Signal at @MeghanEMorris.1 (PR pitches only by email.)She enjoys speaking about tech, finance, and news on television, at conferences, and on podcasts. Please email for booking.These are some of her favorite features she has written over the years:She spent the 2022-23 academic year doing Columbia University's Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, where she took courses in statistics, advanced corporate finance, family office management, and other classes at Columbia Business School. During her fellowship, she also led MBA seminars on due diligence and brought Pulitzer-winning authors to the business school.Before she joined Business Insider in 2018, she wrote about private equity real estate for three years at the industry's trade magazine, PERE. Meghan holds bachelor's and master's journalism degrees from Northwestern University.