February saw some major personnel moves in the Boston tech scene, including former GE CEO Jeff Immelt joining athenahealth's board as chairman and Drift hiring a Hulu vet.
On the last day of February, Localytics announced that former Acquia CEO and founding director Tom Erickson has joined the company's board of directors.
Other big moves were made by Bain Capital Ventures, Compt, MIT, OpenView and TripAdvisor. Avid Technology, on the flip side, fired its CEO of five years for workplace misconduct.
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• 128 Technology appointed Dino Farinacci and Shawn Zandi to its technical advisory board. A former Cisco Fellow, Farinacci is currently serving as an independent consultant for both incumbent and emerging networking vendors, while Zandi is at LinkedIn.
• Agero hired Candy Boschard as a senior product manager. Boschard joined Agero from Liberty Mutual Insurance.
• Athenahealth appointed former GE CEO Jeff Immelt as a chairman of the company’s board, BBJ reported. Immelt was the ninth chairman of GE, a position he held for 16 years.
• Avid Technology, a publicly traded software company in Burlington, fired CEO Louis Hernandez Jr. due to violations of the company’s workplace conduct policies. The company announced the termination of Hernandez Jr. on Monday and said that Jeff Rosica, who has been an Avid executive since 2013, has been appointed as the new CEO, effective immediately. Hernandez Jr. also resigned as chairman of the board — a position he’s held since 2008, according to his LinkedIn. Nancy Hawthorne, who had previously served as interim CEO for Avid, has been elected as the board’s new chairman.
• Bain Capital Ventures added Adam Levin as a Boston-based partner. Levin, who will focus on growth stage investing in enterprise software and data services companies, was most recently VP of growth private equity at Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors.
• Battery Ventures, which counts Wayfair, Akamai and ITA Sofware among its big local exits, promoted Morad Elhafed, who has been working for the firm in Boston for the last 10 years, to general partner. Elhafed, a native of Morocco, came to Battery in 2008 after working as an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.
• Botkeeper, an automated bookkeeping service that recently raised a $4.5 million seed round, appointed Doug Sleeter, founder and CEO of The Sleeter Group, to its board of advisors.
• Care.com made two new appointments to its board of directors: Marla Blow and William H. Harris. Blow is the founder and CEO of FS Card (a credit card venture), and she was previously the assistant director for card and payment markets at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Harris is the founding CEO of digital wealth management firm Personal Capital, and he had previously served as CEO of PayPal and Intuit.
• CarGurus hired Wendy Harris as VP of European sales. Harris, who will work from CarGurus’ European HQ in Dublin, Ireland, was previously at Dropbox, where she served as director of EMEA core enterprise sales.
• Compt, the stealthy startup founded by former Jana COO Amy Spurling, brought on two co-founders: James Echmalian as CTO and Sarah Bedrick as head of marketing. Echmalian was previously at CloudHealth, Endeca and Noteflight. Bedrick was one of HubSpot’s first 200 hires and was responsible for the launch of HubSpot’s Academy Division.
• Drift hired Kari Howe, who was most recently a senior manager of talent development at Hulu. Howe announced that she is joining on LinkedIn.
• Eastern Labs, Eastern Bank’s technology laboratory, hired Ashley Nagle Eknaian as chief digital strategist. Formerly, Eknaian was a managing director of State Street’s Emerging Technologies Center, BBJ reported.
• Endurance International Group, the Burlington-based owner of brands like Bluehost and Constant Contact, appointed two new executives: Christine Timmins Barry as chief services officer and Kim Simone as enterprise transformation officer. Barry was previously CEO and president of Windham Professionals, and Simon was previously VP of enterprise solutions at Verizon Communications.
• Everbridge hired Rodney Billingsley as VP of public sector sales. A former director at Tintri, Billingsley will spearhead the opening of a new Everbridge office in Washington, D.C. The company also hired Jim Totton as EVP of product management, engineering and operations. Totton joins the company from Red Hat, where he served as VP and general manager.
• Flipside Crypto, the cryptocurrency investing service founded by serial entrepreneur Dave Balter, hired Eric Stone as its head of data science. Stone previously worked at Pluralsight, a Utah-based company that acquired one of Balter’s prior startups, Smarterer.
• HubSpot announced that CFO John Kinzer, who helped the company with its 2014 IPO, is stepping down at the end of the year, BBJ reported. A company spokeswoman said Kinzer, who was previously CFO at BackOffice Associates, “will be spending more time with his family, and will also be focusing more on the nonprofit and board work that he’s passionate about.”
• Iboss hired Christian Kasper as COO and CFO. Prior to joining iboss, Kasper was president and CEO of Harvest Power.
• ClimaCell hired Ira Scharf as COO. Scharf was previously at The Weather Company for eight years. Priot to that he was at AirDat as president of commercial services and Bitsight as CSO.
• Localytics, a mobile engagement platform, appointed Tom Erickson, Acquia’s former CEO and founding director, to the company’s board of directors. Erickson stepped down as Acquia’s CEO last year.
• Mad*Pow hired Kathryn Hautanen as director of the company’s Center for Health Experience Design. Hautanen previously held positions at Synopsys, Intel and, most recently, Deloitte.
• Mautic announced that Melissa Leffler has joined the company as VP of engineering. Most recently, Leffler held senior engineering leadership roles at Carbon Black.
• MIT appointed Eric Schmidt, who until January was the executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, as a visiting innovation fellow for one year, starting this spring. Specifically, Schmidt will be serving as an advisor to the MIT Intelligence Quest, an institute-wide initiative to pursue hard problems on the horizon of intelligence research.
• Moltin, an ecommerce software startup, hired Jamus Driscoll as CEO. Driscoll previously held executive roles at Demandware.
• New Enterprise Associates added former GE CEO Jeff Immelt as a venture partner.
• OpenSky, a wholly owned subsidiary of TÜV Rheinland, appointed Anish Srivastava as CEO and president. Prior to joining OpenSky, Srivastava held leadership and executive positions at IBM, most recently as managing partner and practice leader of the North America IBM security services business unit.
• OpenView promoted Elizabeth Cain to general partner, making her the second woman to sit on the Boston VC firm’s investment committee. Cain joined OpenVIew as VP of go-to-market. Before that, she was AVP of worldwide business development at NetSuite.
• Paytronix Systems announced three new additions: Eric Israel as head of global sales, Carl Gern as head of global partner sales and Eddie Ayala as a West Coast sales representative. Before joining Paytronix, Israel was at Trillium, Gern at Experian Data Quality and Ayala at Custom Business Solutions.
• Pegasystems appointed Jeff Taylor as SVP of strategy and go-to-market operations. Most recently, Taylor was a partner at Bain & Company.
• Piaggio Fast Forward hired Brian Kendall as the new VP of finance. Before joining the company, Kendall was a VP for finance and administration at Faction Inc.
• PTC disclosed that COO Craig Hayman resigned, effective Feb. 13, to become CEO of Aveva Group, a British multinational IT company that is merging with Schneider Electric. Read more about the move in Reuters.
• Quick Base hired Cynthia Gumbert as VP of marketing. Gumbert has held leadership positions at Markforged, CA Technologies and Dell.
• Seismic, a San Diego-based company, hired former Guidewire Software CEO and founder John Raguin as chief marketing officer. Raguin will work out of Seismic’s Boston office.
• Sigfox, an Internet of Things connectivity provider, announced that Christian Olivier has joined as president of Sigfox USA, which is based in Boston. Olivier previously held general management roles at Alcatel, ST Microelectronics and Aversan.
• TripAdvisor announced that Jay C. Hoag, founding general partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, has been appointed to a newly created seat on the company’s board of directors, bringing the total number of directors to nine. Hoag has been serving on the boards of Netflix, Electronic Arts and Zillow.
• Turbonomic hired Christopher Sullivan as SVP of global alliances and channels. Previously, Sullivan held the title of SVP of global channels and alliances at Hortonworks.
• Uber’s SVP of Leadership and Strategy Frances Frei is leaving after serving the role since last June, Recode reported. Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School.
• ZyloTech announced the appointment of Art Souza as VP of product marketing. Souza previously served as VP of products at Epsilon.
