January was a big month for personnel moves in Boston tech, but General Catalyst ended up taking the cake for its blockbuster hire: the Cambridge venture capital firm announced on the penultimate day of the month that it appointed retiring American Express CEO Ken Chenault as chairman and managing director.
There were other big moves, like Jibo and WordStream appointing new CEOs. A number of other companies, like Drizly, Akamai and ClimaCell, made leadership hires.
Other Boston companies that made big hiring news in January included CloudHealth Technologies, Devoted Health, Mimecast, Notarize and Underscore.VC.
If you think I’m missing someone from the list, email me at dmartin@americaninno.com.
• Advanced Cyber Security Center hired Lisa Johnson as its director of programs and communications. Most recently, Johnson handled all marketing program development in healthcare for Everbridge.
• Akamai hired Fari Ebrahimi as its new chief information officer. Previously, Ebrahimi held the same role at California-based Avaya.
• Astarte Medical Partners, a member of PULSE@MassChallenge, hired Jeff Sherman as CTO. He was previously director of business reporting and analytics with AC Lordi Consulting.
• Barkly, a local cybersecurity startup, hired Nick Chu as its director of design. Previously, Chu held positions at Grapevine and Turbonomic.
• BlueConic hired Michele Szabocsik as its new vice president of marketing. Szabocsik comes to BlueConic from Visual IQ.
• Carbon Black hired Tom Kellermann as chief cybersecurity officer. Previously, he was CEO at Strategic Cyber Ventures.
• Carbonite promoted Larry Friedman to chief information security officer. He was previously the company’s CTO.
• Cengage Learning announced expanded leadership roles for two of its executives: Fernando Bleichmar and Todd Markson have been appointed chief product officer and chief strategy officer, respectively.
• ClimaCell added former Cengage exec Eran Hollander as vice president of product development, former Skyhook Wireless exec Farshid Alizadeh-Shabdiz as chief scientist, and former ZeroTurnaround exec Matt Duffy as vice president of marketing. The company also promoted Sophia Tupolev-Luz from chief of staff to head of people.
• CloudHealth Technologies hired Greg Nicastro as chief product officer. He was most recently executive vice president of product development at Veracode, which was acquired by CA Technologies last year.
• Como Audio promoted Peter Skiera to vice president of product development. At Como, Skiera had held the role of senior product developer since the company's founding in February 2016. Previously, he spent 15 years as a senior product manager for Tivoli Audio.
• Devoted Health hired Nancy Go as its new CMO. Previously, Go was vice president of brand marketing at Wayfair.
• Drift, a marketing startup led by two former HubSpot execs, hired Jim Kelliher, Actifio's CFO who previously helped LogMeIn through its IPO in the same role. Keliher will serve as Drift's first-ever CFO, another sign that the company is super serious about building a new pillar company here in Boston. Boston Business Journal reported that Actifio has been planning for Kelliher's departure for six months and that a replacement will be announced soon.
• Drizly announced three leadership hires: Scott Braun as CMO, Joe Grabmeier as CFO and Gabriela McManus as head of people operations, the latter of whom we previously reported on. Braun was most recently global marketing director for Gillette and was vice president of marketing at Vistaprint before that. Grabmeier was previously CFO at Adelphic, which Time Inc. acquired last year. McManus, as we had previously noted, was most recently executive director of Intelligent.ly, which is closing.
• Flagship Pioneering, a Cambridge VC firm that focuses on life sciences companies, appointed Jason Pontin as a senior partner. Pontin is a tech journalist who was most recently editor-in-chief at MIT Technology Review.
• Fuze promoted Ted Engel, previously director of sales, to vice president of worldwide commercial sales.
• Gamalon, an artificial intelligence startup, hired Damian Roskill as its vice president of marketing. Roskill was most recently CMO of AppNeta.
• GasBuddy promoted Michael DiLorenzo from vice president of marketing to CMO. Prior to joining the company in August 2016, he served as a vice president at both Drizly and Rue La La.
• General Catalyst appointed retiring American Express CEO and Chairman Ken Chenault as chairman and managing director. Chenault had served as American Express's CEO and chairman since 2001. As of last October, he was only one of four black CEOs in the Fortune 500.
• HMS hired Emmet O'Gara as executive vice president of total population management. His responsibilities include leadership of Eliza, a health engagement business based in Danvers that HMS acquired in 2017. O'Gara is the former senior vice president and chief revenue officer at Cota.
• HubSpot started out 2018 with a slate of new leadership hires: Michelle Benfer as vice president of sales, Andrew Lindsay as vice president of corporate development, Lan Marinelli as associate general counsel, Susanne Rönnqvist as vice president of international marketing, and Elizabeth Ruscitto as director of developer relations. Benfer was most recently vice president of sales for LogMeIn's LastPass business, Lindsay was previously vice president of corporate development at wearable company Jawbone, Marinelli was at Athenahealth, Rönnqvist was vice president of business marketing at Klarna, and Ruscitto was at Leap Motion.
• Jibo Inc. quietly replaced its CEO in December, roughly two months after the Boston-based company released its eponymous $899 social robot. The company’s website lists its new CEO as Brian Eberman, who had been Jibo’s CTO since he joined the company in May 2017. Eberman replaces Steve Chambers, who had served as CEO since May 2014 and is now listed on the website as executive chairman.
• Kitewheel, a marketing tech company, expanded its management team with several key executive hires: Neil Skilling as CTO, Timothy Claytor as senior vice president of partner development, Rick Fuller as vice president of direct sales, Joshua Berkowitz as vice president of product development, Roy Todd as vice president of engineering, and James Allum as managing director, EMEA.
• Lionbridge Technologies appointed Jaime Punishill as CMO and Jim Weber in the company's newly created position of chief revenue officer. Most recently, Punishill was head of brand strategy at TIAA and Weber served as CRO of HireRight.
• Mimecast, a London-based provider of email security software that has its North American HQ in Watertown, announced two leadership appointments: Janet Levesque as senior vice president of systems, risk and security, and Marc French as chief trust officer. Levesque was most recently CIO at RSA, the security division of Dell EMC, and French was previously chief security officer at Constant Contact, a subsidiary of Endurance International Group.
• New England Venture Capital Association added six new board members: Nancy Brown of Oak HC/FT, Margarita Chavez of AbbVie Ventures, Sarah Hodges of Pillar, Joshua Resnick of SV Health Investors, Liam Donahue of .406 Ventures, and Colleen Cuffaro of Canaan.
• NextView announced a new initiative called Operator Guilds, where the Boston VC firm enlists experienced operators to help with their portfolio companies. In a way, it sounds kind of similar to the community-driven approach other local VC firms like Pillar and Underscore.VC have taken. For NextView's go-to-market guild, the company has enlisted Notarize vice president of Marketing Jessica Meher, Devoted Health CMO Nancy Go and Cybereason CMO Mike Volpe, among others.
• Notarize hired Jessica Meher as its vice president of marketing. She is the founder of Girl Capital and previously held leadership positions at InVision and HubSpot.
• Progress Partners, a Boston- and New York-based corporate M&A advisory firm, hired David Arslanian as its new managing director. Most recently, Arslanian held senior positions at Telaria.
• Repsly announced the addition of David Mann and Len Bruskiewitz to the firm’s leadership team. Mann, who joined the company as vice president of Finance, was director of financial planning and analysis at Tufts Health Plan. Bruskiewitz, who joined Repsly as director of global channel development, was partnerships director at Grasshopper (part of LogMein).
• Sense, a Cambridge-based maker of a device that monitors home energy usage, hired a former manager of the Amazon Alexa team who’s an expert in the field of speech recognition. George Zavaliagkos, who’s joining Sense as vice president of technology, will be responsible for shaping and directing the company’s technology portfolio. At Amazon’s Alexa division, Zavaliagkos led a 300-person team of machine learning and data scientists, engineers, linguists and language associates.
• ThriveHive hired Steve Gottlieb as senior director of demand generation. He was most recently vice president of marketing at SOCi and director of marketing at Main Street Hub in Austin, Texas.
• Underscore.VC appointed Lily Lyman as a principal. She was previously at Facebook, where she worked on the business development and partnerships team.
• Vecna Robotics hired Daniel Patt as its new CEO. Patt was a deputy director for the strategic technology office at DARPA.
• ViralGains hired Vic Pierni as its first CFO. Pierni was previously at Global Capacity and Verivo Software.
• Wayfair hired Molly Sullivan as head of creative. She most recently helped build the creative teams for Salesforce's emerging clouds and industries business. Before that, she founded Edelman Digital's Pacific Northwest digital and creative teams, where she led work for brands like Microsoft and Starbucks. The company also appointed Jeffrey Naylor, a former TJX Companies CFO, to its board of directors. Naylor has also held leadership roles at Big Lots, Limited Brands, and Sears.
• Wiser, the combined operations of the companies previously known as Mobee and QuadAnalytix, hired Mathieu “Mat” Gagné as its first CFO. Previously, Gagné served as CFO at Alert Innovation, EBI Consulting and MyWebGrocer.
• WordStream promoted President Howard Kogan to the role of CEO. He is taking over from Ralph Folz, who will remain on the board of directors and serve now as executive chairman to focus on external relationships, partnerships and growth by acquisition.
• XebiaLabs, a provider of DevOps and continuous delivery software tools, hired Robert Stroud as its chief product officer. Stroud was most recently a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Before that, he held leadership positions at CA Technologies.
