This month brought some big personnel news from the Boston venture capital community: Underscore.VC co-founder C.A. Webb announced today that she is stepping down, NextView Vice President of Platform Jay Acunzo said he plans to move to New York this summer while taking a new role at the firm and MIT's new VC firm named Katie Rae as its CEO.
There were plenty of other big announcements this month, including Jennifer Lum stepping down from Adelphic, Fuze naming a new CEO and MassChallenge bringing on one of its early evangelists as its new Boston leader.
• Acquia hired Laura Brooks as its new vice president of commerce. She was most recently vice president of product management for Panera Bread and has also held leadership roles at Staples and IBM’s Center of Competence.
• Adelphic Mobile co-founder Jennifer Lum said she is leaving the company after Time Inc. announced it would acquire Adelphic earlier this month. No word on any specific plans yet. Her angel investments include clypd, Kinvey and Placester.
• Bedrock Data appointed Ramon Chen to its board of advisors. Chen is the CMO and vice president of marketing and product management at Reltio.
• BitSight hired Brian Cohen as the company’s first CFO. Cohen was previously CFO at Digital Ocean, Jumptap, DynamicOps and Q1 Labs. The company also hired Elizabeth Fischer as its general counsel and Dave Fachetti as its senior vice president of partnerships. Fisher was previously assistant general counsel at Constant Contact and Fachetti will remain managing director of Globespan Capital Partners.
• Brainshark, a provider of sales enablement and readiness services, brought on Dermot O’Grady as its new CFO, taking the place of Mike McEachern. O’Grady has prior CFO experience from his time at Xkoto, a database virtualization software company that was acquired by Teradata, and Convoq, a web conferencing company.
• Building Engines, a provider of commercial real estate management software, made two executive hires: David O’Connor as CFO and Mark Feldman as vice president of marketing. O'Connor was previously CFO of Buildium, and Feldman was most recently VP of marketing at Motion Recruitment Partners. Feldman has also worked at Backupify and AgION Technologies. The company also promoted Senior Vice President of Marketing Scott Sidman to chief marketing and strategy officer.
• Bullhorn made three promotions: Mike Restivo, formerly the company’s senior vice president of global sales, is now its chief revenue officer; Kim Castelda, previously senior vice president of human resources and talent, has stepped up as its new chief people officer; and ex-director of marketing communications, Vinda Souza, has been named vice president of marketing communications.
• Cambridge Semantics, which provides graph-based data management and analytics solutions, added Sam Chance as its new managing director of pre-sales in the solution engineering organization. Previously, Chance was director of special programs and principal technologist at iNovex Information Systems.
• CarGurus, the Cambridge-based automotive shopping marketplace, hired Tom Caputo as its new senior vice president of product. Most recently, Caputo worked as the chief product officer at Fiksu.
• Catalant hired Bryan Stevenson as its new chief information officer. Stevenson, who will provide technical and engineering leadership, was most recently part of the co-founding team at InsightSquared, where he served as CTO. He will remain an advisor at InsightSquared.
• Crayon hired Ellie Mirman as its CMO. Mirman, who was one of BostInno's 50 on Fire winners in 2016, was previously vice president of marketing at Toast.
• Curata, a Boston-based content marketing tech startup, appointed Matt Cordaro as its head of customer success. He was previously the director of customer success at Hootsuite.
• EverQuote appointed Mira Wilczek, CEO of startup incubator Cogo Labs, to its board.
• Fasten, a Boston-based ride-hailing company, added David Piperno as CFO. He was formerly vice president of strategy and finance at Zipcar.
• Fuze, a Cambridge-based provider of unified cloud communications software, named Dyn CEO Colin Doherty as its new leader while giving former Fuze CEO Steve Kokinos the role of executive chairman. Before Dyn, Doherty had served as CEO of BTI Systems and Arbor Networks.
• GE named William “Mo” Cowan as its vice president of legal policy and litigation. Cowan was previously an advisor to former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and an interim U.S. senator.
• Hexadite, a provider of security orchestration and automation software, added Cylance Research Officer Jon Miller to its advisory board.
• Iron Mountain appointed Fidelma Russo as its CTO. Russo held previous leadership roles at Dell EMC, HP and Sun Microsystems.
• Jay Acunzo, vice president of platform at NextView Ventures, is moving to New York this summer and will take on a new role at the firm: creative in residence. Ginny Mineo, who was most recently manager of content marketing strategy at HubSpot, is taking over Acunzo's role.
• Komand added Sam Whelan as vice president of sales. Prior to Komand, Whelan headed up North American sales at Resilient Systems, which was acquired by IBM last year.
• LogMeIn co-founder Michael Simon joined the board of SessionM, a Boston-based tech company focused on marketing management, automation and analytics.
• MassChallenge hired Kiki Mills Johnston as the new managing director of the accelerator's Boston program. She takes over the role of Scott Bailey, who has become the accelerator's executive director for North America, a newly created role. Mills Johnson was previously in Austin and San Francisco serving as the chief innovation officer of Mission Capital and CEO of Full Circle Fund, respectively. Before that, she was the leader MITX (Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange).
• SmarterTravel, a subsidiary of TripAdvisor, added Eric Bosco as its new general manager for its advertising network, SmarterAds. Previously, Bosco was CEO of adtech company ChoiceStream.
• Teikametrics, a Boston-based provider of Amazon seller tools, named Aatish Salvi as its CTO. He was most recently vice president of engineering for adtech company Nanigans.
• The Engine, MIT’s new venture fund and startup accelerator, hired Katie Rae as its president and CEO, as well as managing partner for its first fund. Rae is currently co-founder and managing director of Project 11 Ventures, a local pre-seed venture capital firm, and she previously served as managing director of Techstars Boston.
• Trilio Data hired Tom Lahive as general manager for cloud, service providers and technology alliance partners. He was previously the global director of Actifio’s service provider program.
• Underscore.VC co-founder C.A. Webb is stepping down from her role at the Boston venture capital firm. In a Medium post published Monday, Webb said she is “taking a few months to read and talk and think” before she is ready for her next full-time commitment.
• Vecna Technologies, the robotics company that scooped up remote telepresence company VGo, announced Dwight Moore as VGo’s new chief executive officer. Most recently, Moore served as president of Echelon Partners, a private equity company focused on growing SMBs.
• Veritas Genetics hired Dr. Birgit Funke as its VP of clinical affairs. She was previously at Partners Healthcare's Laboratory of Molecular Medicine. She's also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
• Vesper, a Boston-based voice technology company, hired Sarah Downey as interim vice president of marketing. Downey will continue to serve as a principal at Cambridge venture capital firm Accomplice, which has invested in Vesper. She will also continue to angel invest for pre-seed or seed round companies.
• Wellist, a patient experience software provider for health care organizations, added two executives: CTO Erik Hjortshoj and VP of Growth Sharyn Lee. Hjortshoj was previously CTO at Burning Glass Technologies and ShapeUp, and Lee previously was co-founder and president of the Medical Education Broadcast Network.
Featured image credits (clockwise, from top-left): Colin Doherty, Kiki Mills Johnston, Ramon Chen, Ellie Mirman, Aatish Salvi, Kim Castelda, Katie Rae and Vinda Souza.
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