Boston's business elite has been busy this past week. Catch up on who's going where below:
Polaris Partners brought on a new partner this week with the addition of Amy Schulman. Schulman will be the firm’s only female investing partner, and arguably one of the a handful of women venture capitalists in the Boston area. The former general counsel and executive vice president at Pfizer will make investments in the biotech space.
WiTricity has hired Farooq Butt as its new SVP of business development and strategy. Butt will continue the company’s commercial momentum, and work on building new markets for the Watertown, Mass.-based firm in the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to joining the company, he worked as vice president of worldwide business development and strategy for Dell’s End User solutions.
Wayfair tapped Romero Rodrigues as its newest board member. As CEO for comparison shopping at Naspers, a South African multinational mass media company, and co-founder of the Buscapé Company, a digital commerce group, Rodrigues brings extensive entrepreneurial and e-commerce that will prove helpful to the Boston-based home decor retailer as it continues to scale. After all, Wayfair is taking steps towards its initial public offering. The addition of Rodrigues, who has many years of experience expanding into global markets, could be a sign that Wayfair is setting its sights abroad.
The company also announced on Thursday that it will open a new customer service center in Utah in mid-August. The center will be the third Wayfair outpost in the area, as it already has a warehouse and a customer service center in nearby Ogden. The new locale is predicted to create 500 new jobs over the next three years.
Ex-ReadWrite senior writer and mobile editor Dan Rowinski has joined local tech firm Applause to lead the company’s content strategy. The app quality company also took the time to announce that it recently brought on former Forrester Principal Analyst Ben Gray as an enterprise app quality evangelist. Both new additions will be working with the startup’s Seattle-based data science team.
