It goes without saying that a tech company is only as good as its employees. In fact, sometimes one key hire can get a startup on the path to success. And very often, executive hiring is one of the best indicators of how well a startup is performing—or at the very least, how promising their future appears to be. In May, news about Boston tech jobs was abundant, with a slew of local firms bringing on some big names—many of them from even bigger companies—signaling that the future indeed looks bright.
Here are the hires to know about.
Openbay: David Vallance as VP of product
Vallance is undoubtedly a notable addition to Openbay, a Cambridge online marketplace for auto repair: He's a veteran of multiple tech giants, including Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Amazon. And most recently, he held a key role at Amazon’s warehouse robotics unit Kiva Systems, in which he led the deployment engineering group—and, according to his LinkedIn, oversaw the integration of more than $600 million worth of robotics systems a year. Vallance’s experience with merging new technology (robotics) with legacy systems (like warehouses) should come in handy at Openbay, which is trying to do something along the same lines—bringing the auto repair services industry online.
Tapjoy: Sean Lindsay as CTO
Lindsay has actually been with Tapjoy since 2012, when the San Francisco-based mobile ad tech firm acquired his social game publishing startup Viximo. But the main reason why this move is so surprising—and significant—is that Tapjoy is a West Coast company, and is making an East Coast engineer its CTO. Over the past few years, Lindsay has been leading the tech teams in San Francisco and Atlanta in addition to Cambridge as VP of engineering. And in the local office, he’s grown out a powerhouse team of 40, adding the former VP of engineering at CustomMade, the former VP of engineering at SavingStar, and former CTO of Epsilon Targeting, to name a few.
Localytics: Scott Bleczinski as CRO
This marks the first time that Boston-based mobile analytics and marketing firm Localytics will have a chief revenue officer. And Bleczinski is a logical choice: He was most recently CRO for NYC-based Docurated, and previously spent eight years as the executive vice president of sales for ExactTarget, during which time the company grew into a marketing technology giant that would be acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion.
PatientsLikeMe: Jason Johnson as EVP and head of R&D
Johnson, a computational biologist, will certainly be an asset to the Cambridge company PatientsLikeMe—which provides a social network for patients with health conditions. Previously, the Harvard grad spent 14 years at Merck, most recently filling the role of associate vice president for scientific informatics. Now, he’ll be leading research sciences, data science, informatics, data and information architecture and strategy, as well as research and development for the product roadmap.
Driftt: John McGeachie as CPO
Since 2010, McGeachie has held multiple VP positions at well-known West Coast app Evernote, according to his LinkedIn. Most recently, though, he was acting as VP of sales and support—and now, he’ll be serving as chief product officer for the Cambridge collaboration technology startup Driftt. In this new role, McGeachie will be responsible for a mix of product marketing, go-to-market execution, market development, and various operational aspects of getting products built and launched. Speaking of new products, Driftt just launched Annotate today—ranking almost at the top of the list on Product Hunt.
Bullhorn: Danielle du Toit as SVP of global services
Du Toit brings a whopping 15 years of experience in professional services for IT and technology companies to her new role at Bullhorn, a Boston-based company that makes CRM and recruiting software. Formerly VP for professional services for the America division at Salesforce, du Toit will now lead Bullhorn’s team of 75 services professionals. helping to drive quality of customer experience while developing an ecosystem of system integration partners dedicated to customer success. In her most recent leadership role at Salesforce, du Toit was responsible for driving strategy, structure, management, and operations to ensure client success, client retention, and achieve key business/financial metrics.
“Danielle has a passion and drive for customer service and for enabling business growth that’s obvious through her energy and her fantastic track record of helping customers of all sizes and industries grow and thrive,” said CEO Art Papas in a press statement. “And with such deep domain expertise in SaaS-based CRM, she’s the perfect fit to lead our rapidly-expanding global services business.”
Onapsis: Ron Trackey as VP of product development
Trackey boasts more than two decades of experience delivering software with Fortune 100 companies between Microsoft and EMC's security division, RSA. Most recently at RSA, he served in a senior role focused on fraud and authentication. And before that, Trackey spent 15 years at Microsoft, in various product leadership roles for MSN, Bing Mobile and MSN services. His prior work in program management will be helpful in his new role helping the Boston cybersecurity firm Onapsis with its development roadmap. Trackey will be responsible for innovation and product development.
Photos courtesy of Tapjoy, PatientsLikeMe and Bullhorn. Image of Fort Point Channel via Emmanuel Huybrechts, Wikimedia Commons.
