Identifying the top career moves of year is more subjective than something like, say, listing the top funding rounds or tracking down companies that ceased operations.
This year, we included big leadership changes at General Electric, Lola and Nuance Communications, plus prominent appointments in the board of directors of athenahealth, Akamai and Desktop Metal.
In December, two departures shook the local MassChallenge's startup accelerators in Boston and Rhode Island, with both directors leaving their positions. Another vacancy still to be filled is the role of director of the Babson Summer Venture program, which David Chang left after becoming CEO of Gradifi in late November.
Here are BostInno’s top 16 Boston tech hires and departures:
• Athenahealth appointed former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt as a chairman of the company’s board, BBJ reported in February. Immelt was the ninth chairman of GE, a position he held for 16 years.
• In April, Akamai appointed William “Bill” Wagner, president and CEO of LogMeIn since 2015, to the company’s board of directors.
• Algorand, an MIT-born blockchain startup, made some key hires in October: Steve Kokinos, co-founder and chairman at Fuze, is the CEO and W. Sean Ford, co-founder of uPromise and former CMO of LogMeIn, now serves as COO.
• In June, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan selected Dr. Atul Gawande, a general and endocrine surgeon, as CEO of their Boston-based healthcare company. In September, the trio found a COO as well: Jack Stoddard, who most recently served as general manager for digital health at Comcast.
• Former co-founder and general partner at Accomplice, Chris Lynch, became the new CEO of Californian big data startup AtScale in June.
• In June, online automotive marketplace CarGurus announced the appointment of Steve Conine to the company’s board of directors. Steve is co-founder and co-chairman of Wayfair, where he served as CTO until 2015.
• In September, Boston-based cryptocurrency trading startup Circle named Gus Coldebella, a former acting general counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as its chief legal officer.
• In June, CyPhy Works confirmed that Helen Greiner, the robotics visionary who started the company ten years ago and later switched to the role of CTO, left the company in late 2017.
• Burlington-based 3D-printing startup Desktop Metal added former General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to its board of directors in July.
• In October, General Electric replaced CEO John Flannery and appointed the former chief executive of Danaher Corp., H. Lawrence Culp, Jr., as his replacement. Flannery had only been in the CEO role since August 2017.
• Gradifi, a Boston-based provider of student loan and college saving employee benefit, appointed David Chang as CEO in November. Most recently, Chang was one of the 21 Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at Harvard Business School and director of the Babson Summer Venture Program.
• In June, Cambridge-based software firm HubSpot tapped Akamai’s SVP of business finance and operations, Kate Bueker, as its new CFO. Bueker has been at Akamai for eleven years.
• Change in leadership at Lola in August: Mike Volpe, previously CMO at Cybereason, took the reins of the business travel startup as CEO, with former CEO and co-founder Paul English stepping into a CTO role.
• In May, Watertown-based 3D-printing startup Markforged hired Kevin Rhodes, former CFO of Boston-based Brightcove.
• In December, Kiki Mills Johnston and Andrew Mallon, directors of MassChallenge's startup accelerators in Boston and Rhode Island, left their positions. MassChallenge co-founder and CEO John Harthorne also plans to leave the network of startup accelerators to form an affiliated for-profit entity; the name of the new MassChallenge CEO will be announced during the first half of 2019.
• After more than 15 months of silence, the board of Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications announced the name of the company’s new CEO in March: Mark Benjamin, who served as president and COO of Georgia-based public electronics company NCR Corp. Benjamin took over in April.
• Nonprofit organization TUGG appointed a new executive director: Mike Cole, who helped scale revenue at community-focused startups like Reddit and Nextdoor. Cole took over the role on June 1st.
