Austin is a technology talent powerhouse. The city’s blend of software and business minds -- as well as social impact startups and artists -- is one of the reasons companies including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook have made Austin one of their primary hubs. It’s also why Austin is able to produce such a steady flow of promising startups and continually attract new companies to relocate.
We track these movements of human capital in our daily newsletter, the Beat.
Below, we’ve listed the top Austin tech and startup hires we spotted in May.
Miratech, an Austin legal tech company, reported plans to lay off 83 workers, a state filing shows. The company’s CEO, Jason Parkman said the layoffs are part of the company’s plan to build a new presence in India for engineering and support. Of the layoffs, 57 will be from the company’s Austin office.
Civitas Learning founder and CEO Charles Thornburgh is shifting his role to chief strategy and innovation officer, and the company is adding Chris Hester as its new CEO. Hester was previously president of WellSky, and he had been CEO of Kinnser Software for about 15 years. Civitas Learning, which makes software to help students graduate from college, recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Francisco Partners. Learn more about the move in the ABJ [subscriber content].
NSS Labs, an Austin cybersecurity startup, promoted Jason Brvenik to CEO. He was previously CTO at the company, and he takes the place of Vikram Phatak, who founded the company in 2007. Phatak will remain active on the company’s board and executive team. Prior to joining NSS Labs in 2017, Brvenik held leadership roles at Sourcefire.
Legal software startup DISCO announced it added Cat Casey as its first chief innovation officer. Casey comes from Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, where she led the firm’s ediscovery and tech team. Before that, she worked in computer forensics and ediscovery at PwC.
Upswing, an Austin ed startup, added Christine Wyatt as its chief revenue officer. She was previously chair of the board of directors at Upswing and CEO of TWG Plus, an Austin higher education marketing firm.
SourceDay, a local supply chain automation startup, added former Spredfast VP of Brand and Revenue Marketing Sarah Moore as its new CMO. It also picked up former NSS Labs and Ping Identity exec Emeka Obinwu as its SVP of alliances and channel. Prior to Spredfast, Moore worked at Socialware, Lombardi Software and Trilogy. Obinwu worked at BuildForge and IBM prior to his other roles. The hires follow a $6.5 million Series A near the end of 2018.
Testlio, a managed QA services company for consumer apps, is back in Austin. Sorta. The company has its roots here, emerging from the first Austin Techstars Accelerator. Since then, it has added investments from several Austinintes, including Don Douglas (of Geekdom Fund), Pat Matthews (of Active Capital) and Rob Taylor (of Convey). Now, it has made several new hires and shifted to a distributed team with members in Austin and several other cities, especially in Estonia. Its new-ish CEO Steve Semelsberger is here, along with new hires, including: Head of Sales Gabe Dennison (formerly of Oracle); Marketing Director Tim Ryan (formerly of Kazoo and Dell) and Taylor McKenna (formerly of Spredfast and Vrbo).
Lifesize, an Austin-based video collaboration and meeting productivity company, announced new hires for its Asia-Pacific markets. David Russell joins Lifesize as country manager for Australia-New Zealand after leading Nexon Asia Pacific’s unified communications-as-a-service unit. Adil Khan was named country manager for India and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Khan was previously with Polycom’s enterprise and managed services sales team in India. And it named Sherman Lee as country manager for Korea. Lee most recently led partner development for data protection and information management software vendor Commvault.
Zacoustic, an Austin predictive analytics company, named Mark Ferrel as its CTO. Ferrel was founder of Universata, which was acquired by HealthPort. He was most recently co-founder of RecordConnect, a healthcare records company.
TicketCity, an Austin ticketing company, announced it has acquired Las Vegas-based fan travel startup Fandeavor, which was founded by Tom Ellingson and Dean Curtis in 2012. Terms of the deal weren’t shared.
Naturally Austin, an organization bringing natural product startups together, announced Jake Sloan is joining as executive director. He’s a former marketing manager at Red Bull. Naturally Austin emerged in March with 21 founding board members, which include some of the biggest names in Austin’s CPG and tech scenes, including Clayton Christopher, Dan Graham, Aimy Steadman and Board President Genevieve Gilbreath.
Women@Austin, a networking group that advocates for women in tech, has named Jessica Gaffney as its CEO. She’s co-founder of Pro Mama, which helps moms find flexible work. The 1,000-plus-strong organization was founded by Jan Ryan and has become part of social impact coworking, investing and networking organization Notley.
Local digital health startup EveryWell, which is coming off a $50 million round of funding, has named Frank Ong as its chief medical and scientific officer. He’ll be in charge of clinical lab operations and new test development. He was previously in leadership at Guardant Health, Roche Diagnostics and Illumina.
Austin health care startup ClearDATA named Suhas Kelkar as chief product officer and Thomas McKeever as general counsel and chief legal officer. Kelkar was previously VP and CTO at BMC. McKeever brings experience from legal departments at Actuate, Shutterfly and Accela.
