Austin tech executives are on the move once again. This time five companies welcomed leaderships changes in the roles of CEO, CTO, chief scientist and SVP of marketing.
Twyla, the online marketplace for museum-quality art that raised $19 million last year, saw a changeup in leadership this summer when CEO Matt Randall stepped down. Brian Sharples, co-founder of Twyla and founder of HomeAway, has stepped up in Randall’s absence.
This news trails a lawsuit against Randall last year that alleged he used money from Pop Austin International Art Show, of which he was a co-founder, toward Twyla. Randall told TechCrunch the lawsuit has been settled outside of court and that he has left Twyla to pursue another company.
Sharples, who stepped down as HomeAway’s CEO last year, will serve as acting CEO while the Twyla team searches for a permanent candidate.
Serenova welcomed contact center product expert Pascal Vincent at its new CTO this week. Vincent joins the omni-channel call center software company from inContact, where he served as VP of engineering. At inContact, Vincent focused on scalability and software quality assurance while leading the engineering and product development teams through inContact’s acquisition by NICE.
“I’ve been following Serenova’s evolution over the last several years and it is clear that the company is well positioned in the market as the world’s most globally scalable CCaaS platform provider,” said Vincent in a statement. “It is essential that we hold ourselves to the highest standards of stability and reliability while delivering ongoing innovation to our customers who provide a world-class customer experience to their markets.”
Earlier this month, John Martis signed on as Codero’s new CEO and President to drive growth. The cloud hosting company’s current co-CEO and chairman of the board Leo Staurulakis will stay on as chairman.
Martis’s 20-year tech history runs deep, having served as president of American Digital Network, EVP at Aplus.Net and President and CEO of Hostway before joining Codero.
“While we will continue adding cloud services and capabilities for our customers and deepening our partnerships with telecommunication providers, our mission remains unchanged – to help people effectively manage growth while maintaining a hassle-free IT infrastructure,” Martis said in a statement.
Freenet founder and coordinator Ian Clarke has joined Blacklight Solutions to lead its new Machine Intelligence Practice as chief scientist. Clarke’s earned a reputation as a major innovator in AI and internet entrepreneur, having launched Freenet, the first peer-to-peer, censorship resistant platform for internet communication. Clarke’s work has also led to the development of user feedback learning search engines, fair and protected pay for creators, real-time bidding engines and programming across multiple computers.
At Blacklight, Clarke will lead the development of products that learn over time how companies can improve daily and long-term performance.
Mathew Lodge has left a container and microservices start-up called Weaveworks to join Continuum Analytics as SVP of products and marketing. In his role, Lodge will lead the efforts to accelerate enterprise adoption of Anaconda, the company's Python data science platform.
Lodge also worked at VMware as VP in the cloud services group, where he co-founded what is now called vCloud Air IaaS service.
“Data science is foundational to digital and AI strategies, allowing organizations to deliver new products and services faster and cheaper, and respond more quickly to customers and competitors,” said Lodge in a statement. “I look forward to working with customers and partners to realize the huge potential of Anaconda to deliver actionable, automated insight and intelligence to every organization.”
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