Kirby Winfield
Kirby Winfield

Kirby Winfield is jumping back into the startup game after his previous company, AdXpose, was sold to comScore for $22 million. Winfield was just named CEO of Dwellable, the vacation rental search service started by serial entrepreneur Adam Doppelt. (It has been a busy week of news for Doppelt, who exchanged his Twitter handle with AMD and dealt with a fake resume). Winfield replaces Brenda Spoonemore who has left the company to serve as an advisor to companies in the digital content and e-commerce arenas. She remains an advisor and investor.

Winfield, who prior to AdXpose worked at Marchex and Go2Net, said he was attracted to the big opportunity in front of Dwellable, which is attempting to be the prime source of vacation rental listings. Winfield said he was attracted to the company, which competes against industry giant HomeAway, for three reasons.

“First, we’re focused on solving a real, big problem for consumers: only about 5 percent of all vacation rental properties can be discovered online today, and those that can be found are often described with very little detail, display low quality photography, or are outright misrepresented. Second, Dwellable is already the leader in the vacation rental space in mobile. More than half of Dwellable’s business occurs via our mobile apps, which is a unique advantage in a world where most vacation search experiences are designed for the Web. And third, it’s still early enough to be exciting – there are a lot of unknowns, and the rocket-ship growth is still ahead of us,” he says.

Dwellable has bootstrapped itself to success, much like Doppelt’s other company, Urbanspoon. Winfield said that they will continue to bootstrap the company, noting that the “great thing about search as a technology is how scalable it can be with relatively low overhead.” More from Winfield on why chose Dwellable in this blog post.

Sandy Sharma
Sandy Sharma

—Srivats Srinivasan is stepping down as president of TiE Seattle as a two-year term at the entrepreneurial organization comes to an end. Srinivasan will be replaced by Sandy Sharma, a serial and current partner in 9Milelabs, the new B2B accelerator in Seattle. “Sandy brings a wealth of experience, new ideas and a fresh perspective that will allow our chapter to grow stronger still,” says Srinivasan.

—Phil Sprute has joined Erado as vice president of sales, following a career that included posts at LexisNexis, Northrop Grumman Information Technology Computer Services and AT&T Solutions. He holds a BA from Washington State University and an MBA from Seattle Pacific University. Founded in 1994, Erado is a leader in archiving, compliance, security, and encryption services.

—Leanplum, a TechStars Seattle grad that specializes in helping developers test their mobile apps, has filled two key engineering positions by hiring Atanas Dobrev and Mark Whitehouse.

—TechStars New York has replaced managing director Eugene Chung just two weeks before the organization’s Demo Day, according to ValleyWag.

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