Steve
Holm

When Steve Holm walked back through Copper's doors in August 2023, he wasn't walking in as a stranger. He'd been employee #4 - the first person to own product and design at a scrappy San Francisco startup then called ProsperWorks. He'd watched it go from a Google Workspace integration with a big idea to a $25M ARR business over five years. Then he left.

He went to scale. First Dropbox, where he led the ecosystem team - building APIs, building a marketplace, learning how a company with real infrastructure actually runs. Then Podium, a Utah-based CRM for local businesses, where he became SVP of Product Design. He was doing well. He wasn't supposed to come back.

But he noticed something from the outside. Copper had shifted. The product soul that made it different - the deep Google Workspace integration, the zero-input data entry philosophy, the obsession with simplicity - had gotten buried under enterprise ambitions and a team hired to execute a strategy that didn't fit the company. Churn was outpacing growth. Three departments were pulling in different directions.

So the board called. And this time, he came back as CEO.

When Holm returned in 2023, he found three departments with incompatible visions. Product wanted product-led growth. Sales wanted enterprise deals. Customer success wanted to stop the churn. Nobody was wrong, exactly. They were just optimizing for different things - and that incoherence was bleeding the company.

His solution wasn't a three-month strategy workshop. It was a single written question: who are we actually building for? The answer became an Ideal Customer Profile pointed squarely at professional services - agencies, consulting firms, financial services, construction. Relationship-centric businesses that live inside Google Workspace and need CRM to feel like it belongs there.

From that ICP, he built four "jobs to be done": connect with leads, win new clients, deliver projects and services, create repeat customers. Every roadmap item had to map to one of those four. Everything else got deprioritized. He promoted what he calls "hidden gems" inside the organization - people doing strong work without visibility - and made hard calls on leaders whose vision didn't fit the new direction.

The measurement shift was equally surgical. Instead of tracking feature adoption, the team now measures whether customers hit their actual business goals. If a contact form is supposed to generate 30 leads a month, that's the number that matters - not whether users clicked the button.

In an industry full of CEOs who came up through finance or sales, Steve Holm's origin story as a product designer shapes everything about how he leads. His first question when evaluating any product decision isn't "will it hit the number?" - it's "does this make sense to a real user trying to accomplish a real goal?"

He describes the CEO role as a natural extension of what design leadership always was: connecting product experiences to business outcomes. The skills transfer more directly than most people expect. You're still solving a problem with incomplete information, still making decisions about what to prioritize and what to cut, still explaining a vision to people who need to believe it before they can execute it.

His Dribbble portfolio still exists - a digital archive of mobile interfaces, branding systems, and iOS design work stretching back to 2011. It's the kind of thing most executives quietly hide. He seems fine with people seeing where he came from.

The risk-tolerant personality that led him to co-found startups in Utah before the Bay Area startup culture was fully exported there - that's still visible in the decisiveness he brings to the CEO seat. He'll make the call. He'll own it if he's wrong. He'd rather be moving than right.

Most CRMs treat Gmail as an integration. Copper treats Gmail as the home screen. Holm's original insight - developed during his Base CRM days and refined over five years building Copper - is that professional services businesses already live inside Google Workspace. Their email is Gmail. Their documents are in Drive. Their meetings are in Calendar.

Asking them to export data into a separate CRM system creates friction that kills adoption. Copper's bet is that if you eliminate that friction - if the CRM auto-populates from the emails you're already sending - you get 10x the data quality and 10x the user engagement.

That bet hasn't changed. What changed under his renewed leadership is the discipline around who they're betting on: agencies, consultants, financial advisors, construction firms. Businesses where relationships are the product, not just the sales channel.