A lot of personnel moves happened in the Boston startup world in November. Perhaps most notably, PillPack added a former campaign manager for President Barack Obama and a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton as advisors.
There were other big moves, such as Acquia, Goji, Pwnie Express and Rize all announcing new CEOs. And athenaheatlh, for the third time in two years, hired a new CFO.
If you think I’m missing someone from the list, email me at dmartin@americaninno.com:
• Acquia announced that former Hewlett Packard Enterprise executive Michael Sullivan will succeed former CEO Tom Erickson. Sullivan, who will work alongside co-founder and chairman Dries Buytaert, was most recently an executive at Micro Focus, which spun out of HPE into its own company in a merger with HPE's software business in September. Before joining HP, he led a business unit at risk and compliance software provider Autonomy and served as the CEO and founder of Steelpoint Technologies.
• Actifio made two additions to its global management team: Mario Werner as country manager for Germany and Larry Irvin as regional vice president of sales for the Northeast. Before Actifio, Werner was a manager at Syncsort, and Irwin was previously the director of U.S. sales for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
• Allure Security, which was founded in Columbia University research labs, has relocated from New York to Boston with the hiring of Mark Jaffe as CEO and chairman and John Sullivan as vice president of sales. Jaffe previously co-founded Prelert, which was acquired by Elastic in 2016. Prior to that, he held leadership roles at McAfee, Securify and OnLink. Sullivan was previously at Uplevel Security and Prelert.
• Athenahealth hired Marc Levine as its new CFO, BBJ reported. Levine, who was previously Evice president and CFO at JDA Software Group, is the company's third CFO in two years. The company's previous CFO, Karl Stubelis, stepped down in July to take on the same role at Arcadia Healthcare Solutions.
• Cambridge BioMarketing hired Michael Tonzola as its new group management supervisor. Tonzola previously served as a vice president at Area 23.
• Cambridge Semantics added Jit Saxena to its board of directors. Saxena is the founder and former CEO of Netezza.
• Catalant Technologies hired Jake Simpson as its executive vice president of worldwide sales. Simpson is the former COO of Onapsis.
• Centage Corporation announced that Ken Marshall, formerly CEO of QuickPivot, would serve as the company’s interim leader after its CEO and President Barry Clapp died on Nov. 16 at the age of 66.
• CollegeVine, an online provider of student mentoring and college admissions guidance for high schoolers and their families, announced several new hires:
- Kara O'Toole is the new vice president of operations. O'Toole is the former COO of Grand Circle Travel.
- Maria Matveeva is the new director of design. Matveeva is the former head of design for DockYard Design.
- Stephen Smith, co-founder of college readiness software provider Naviance, and Anne Bryant, executive director, Emeritus at the National School Boards Association, are CollegeVine's two new advisory board members.
• Freight Farms Head of Community Trish Fontanilla said she left the company to start a restaurant and run a new group called BOSFilipinos, which aims to elevate Filipino culture in Boston. "It was an incredibly difficult decision for me, but I had to go with the thing that radiates from the top of my head to the tips of my toes," Fontanilla wrote in a LinkedIn post.
• Fuze appointed Paul Milbury, former CFO of Starent Networks and Avid Technology, to its board of directors. Milbury will serve as the board's chairman of the audit committee.
• Glasswing Ventures revealed its new Connect Council, the first of three advisory boards that will help the local venture capital firm with its investment strategy. One of the council's working groups, the AI & Academic Group, includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and founder of Jibo; Dr. Thomas R. Eisenmann, faculty co-chair of the Harvard Business School Rock Center for Entrepreneurship; and four other academics.
• Goji hired insurance veteran Peter Breitstone as its CEO. Breitstone was a former senior executive at Insureon, Aon and Zurich. The company also recently brought on LowerMyBills.com founder and investor Matt Coffin as executive chairman. Coffin runs Coffin Capital & Ventures, which has invested in Goji. Former Goji CEO Steve Kezirian left the company in July and now serves as CEO and co-founder of a company called Full Potential Solutions.
• Icebrkr hired Dipali Trivedi as the company's new CTO. Trivedi is currently pursuing her MBA at MIT's Sloan School of Management.
• Interactions, the Franklin-based provider of virtual assistant software, hired Robert Nagle as its CTO and chief product officer. Nagle was previously a vice president at InterSystems.
• Klaviyo, a Boston-based email marketing automation startup, hired former ClassPass COO Steve Wietrecki as the company’s first chief revenue officer. Wietrecki is the company's second C-level executive, and he told BostInno that the company plans to further expand its leadership team in the not-so-distant future.
• Lovepop hired Larry McSheffery as its new head of talent. Previously, McSheffery was director of talent acquisition at DrugDev and Breakaway.
• Mylestone CEO Dave Balter said he is stepping down from his role to become chairman of the Boston startup, which has pivoted a couple times now. Mylestone initially started as an online memorial service and then later focused on creating a personal memory bank for Amazon Alexa (the startup most recently shifted its focus to creating custom photo books, as noted by Xconomy). With that change in focus, the company has gone from B2B to B2C, the latter of which Balter says he doesn't have as much experience in. The company's new CEO is Drew Condon, Mylestone's former head of product. Balter, in the meantime, will put more focus into his cryptocurrency investment service, Flipside Crypto.
• Pepperlane, an online platform where mothers can both find and offer services, added Rachel Jarrett to its advisory board. Jarrett is currently the president and COO of Zola.
• PillPack added two figures from the political realm to its strategic advisory board: Jim Messina, who was President Obama's 2012 campaign manager, and Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, who was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. In a blog post, PillPack CEO TJ Parker said Messina helped broker connections over the last two years with key influencers, insurance providers and pharmacy benefit managers. Summers, on the other hand, helped the company analyze market dynamics in the changing healthcare landscape.
• Pixability, a video advertising platform, hired Alan Beiagi as its chief product officer. Beiagi was most recently vice president of product management at DataXu.
• Placester hired Rishi Dean as its vice president of product. Most recently, Dean was vice president of product at Sittercity.
• Pwnie Express hired Todd DeSisto as its new CEO. DeSisto, who had been a board member and was previously CEO of Axeda Corporation, is taking over from Paul Paget, who is now executive vice president of strategy.
• QuickPivot added Peter Zaballos, CMO of SPS Commerce, to its board of directors.
• RadioPublic added WGBH COO Ben Godley to its board of directors as an observer with the public radio and TV station’s new investment in the startup.
• RateGravity, a Boston-based online mortgage lending platform that went through Techstars this year, hired Mike Ma, a former Bank of America and Betterment executive, as its CMO.
• Rize, a Woburn-based 3D printing startup, hired Andy Kalambi as its new president and CEO. He was previously at Dassault Systemes, where he served in multiple roles, including as CEO of the company's ENOVIA brand.
• Salsify announced four additions to its leadership team: Mary Jefts as its new CFO, Malcolm Faulds as vice president of marketing, Steve McKenzie as vice president of sales for commercial & enterprise accounts, and Doug Bleszinski as vice president of sales for global accounts. Previously, Jefts was CFO for Unidesk, Acquia and OpenPages; Faulds was senior vice president of marketing at Drizly; McKenzie was the vice president of sales at InsightSquared; and Bleszinski held sales leadership roles at Elastic, beqom and Salesforce.
• Stanley Ventures, the venture capital arm of Stanley Black and Decker, hired Dina Routhier as its Boston-based investment manager. Most recently, Routhier was in corporate development at Autodesk, and prior to that spent 11 years as an early-stage VC at Mass Ventures.
• Talla, a business chatbot startup, hired Tara Hendricks as vice president of finance. Previously, Hendricks held the same role at Kinvey.
• Threat Stack hired Jonaki Egenolf as CMO and Chris Ford as vice president of product. Previously, Egenolf served as vice president of global marketing at Veracode and Ford as chief product officer at Blue Cedar Networks.
• TIE Kinetix, a Tewksbury-based provider of cloud-managed business integration, hired Anthony D’Angelo as its vice president of business development. He was previously vice president of sales and marketing at InterTrade Systems.
• UMass Medical School appointed Jim Glasheen as executive vice chancellor for innovation and business development, BBJ reported, starting December 4. Glasheen, who spent the past 15 years at California-based Technology Partners, will replace Brendan O’Leary.
• WEVO, an AI and marketing startup, added Andy Palmer to its advisory board. A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Palmer is best known for co-founding big data startup Tamr.
• ZappRx hired two new executives: James Cornicelli as vice president of corporate strategy and Rich Kramer as vice president of commercial operations. Before joining the digital health company, Cornicelli served as global head of business development for UCB Biopharma’s Immunology and Bone business units, while Kramer was as vice president of sales at Upfront Healthcare.
