Months after racist ad fallout, chamber of commerce names its new leader
Six months after the head of Silicon Valley’s largest chamber of commerce resigned in the wake of a racist campaign ad posted by the group, the Silicon Valley Organization has named its new president.
Derrick Seaver, chief of staff for Santa Clara County Supervisor Susan Ellenberg, has been unanimously chosen by the group’s search committee and approved by its executive committee to lead the 135-year-old organization moving forward. His first day will be May 17.
“With his business and community service background, Derrick Seaver is the right person to lead the SVO forward, strengthening the positive leadership, commitment, and engagement of the organization,” SVO board chair Glenn Perkins said in a news release.
Seaver, 39, of San Jose, said he was “humbled and honored” to be chosen.
“I plan to go in with a spirit of partnership and collaboration, listening not just to our member businesses but to the community at large,” he said in an interview.
This new role as CEO will mark Seaver’s second time working for the SVO, which was previously known as the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce.
He served as the organization’s director of public policy from 2013 to 2017 before becoming director of policy and operations for the San Jose Downtown Association and later chief of staff for Supervisor Ellenberg.
“Anyone who has had the good fortune of working with Derrick knows he is committed to the community he serves and will work with everyone to meet their needs,” Ellenberg said in the news release. “I can think of no better leader, ally or friend to repair and reinforce the integral bridges between our business community and the people who call this place home.”
Seaver will immediately replace interim CEO Bob Linscheid who stepped into the role in December 2020 — about a month after the organization’s previous leader, Matt Mahood, resigned as part of the fallout from a political campaign ad widely denounced as racist. Mahood served as president and CEO of the SVO for 13 years.
The image that led to the unprecedented response from the SVO was posted in late October as part of an attack ad against a San Jose city council candidate who supported police reform. The black-and-white image featured a group of Black men in front of a cloud of tear gas overlain with the words: “Do you really want to sign onto this?”
Although the SVO quickly apologized and launched diversity training programs for staff and members, dozens of influential companies dropped their SVO board seats and many more nonprofit groups and businesses rescinded their SVO memberships.
As a result, the SVO dissolved its political action committee — the organization’s campaign arm that supported business-friendly candidates and wielded considerable influence during election season in the
South Bay.
Following Mahood’s departure, the SVO scrubbed the names of all employees, board members and leadership from its website. Those web pages still cannot be found on the site.
Seaver will be tasked with guiding the embattled organization, which represents about 1,200 business members throughout the greater Silicon Valley that employ 300,000 people, through a period of racial reckoning while reimagining its role in the region’s new political landscape.
Actually, that’s what drew him to consider the job in the first place, he said.
“When I saw what went down last fall, the ability to be part of the organization’s growth and rebuilding was a job that really appealed to me,” he said. “I think a lot of time in the past, the SVO’S mission statement has been narrowed to include only parts of the region’s business community or the community at large, and I want to focus on making sure that this organization is being inclusive of all of the diverse businesses that make up this community.”
One of his first objectives as CEO will be to get his staff “out of the office and onto the streets” to speak to business owners — both small and large and those located all over the region — about the unique challenges they’re facing in order to guide the organization’s policy priorities moving forward, he said.
“I don’t want equity to just be something that the company does but something that the SVO is,” he said. “And I do truly think that in time, the community will see the positive actions that we will be taking to rebuild that trust and confidence.”