Ryan Wuerch has stepped down as CEO of Motricity, the publicly-traded Bellevue mobile software company that he’s run for a decade. The 43-year-old executive, who founded the company in 2001, also resigned from the board.
The resignation comes amid an ongoing executive shakeup at the struggling company, one which has led to the resignations of CFO Allyn Hebner; Chief Development Officer Jim Ryan; general counsel Richard Leigh; and senior vice president Tyler Nelson.
All of those departures have occurred this month and come after Motricity posted disappointing second quarter results on August 9th. The stock has lost 64 percent of its value in the past month, but investors seem to like the news of Wuerch’s termination. The stock is up about two percent today.
Wuerch isn’t walking away empty handed. The board has agreed to provide the executive with a $450,000 severance payment.
Wuerch has been replaced on an interim basis by James R. Smith Jr., the company’s president and chief operating officer. The 44-year-old executive is a veteran of Avaya, and is in the running for the full-time post as an executive search takes place.
Motricity moved to the Seattle area from North Carolina in 2008 after purchasing the mobile assets of Bellevue-based InfoSpace. It went public last year, but the stock has performed poorly since entering the public markets.
Its mCore platform is used by wireless carriers to power mobile data services. Last week, Seattle law firm Hagens Berman filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging that it issued “materially false and misleading statements to investors.”
