—Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz is stepping down, with Pivotal Labs co-founder Rob Mee succeeding him in the position. The data analytics, cloud computing and software development firm was spun out of EMC and VMware after EMC acquired Mee’s Pivotal Labs in 2012.
“The reason that Rob is a natural successor here is that, first of all, he had built one of the key components around which we created Pivotal,” Maritz told the Wall Street Journal.
Mee founded Pivotal Labs to provide software development services in 1989 and served as CEO of the company until it was acquired in 2012. He then oversaw new product development as executive vice president of products and R&D. As CEO, he’ll foster the company’s growth, which just surpassed $100 million in annual bookings run-rate.
Maritz worked as executive vice president of the developer group at Microsoft until 2000, considered to be third in line behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at the time. He then founded a software development firm that was eventually acquired by EMC. In 2008, he became CEO of VMware, before heading Pivotal starting in 2012. Maritz will stay with Pivotal as the executive chairman.
—Reddit hired founding Pinterest engineer Marty Weiner as its first CTO. Weiner will work with the company’s engineering team to improve the underlying infrastructure that supports the massive message board.
Weiner is an especially insightful choice for the position; at Pinterest, he worked on an anti-spam tool that finds offending posts seconds after they’re published. Reddit is fighting a reputation among some that it harbors hate speech and offensive content, but Weiner’s experience in dealing with those problem could help the “front page of the internet” clean up its act.
—Nick Macey is heading to LivingSocial as senior vice president and head of product for the online “experience marketplace.” The newly created role will have Macey optimizing customer interactions and help the company come up with new products.
“This newly created role on the senior team re-emphasizes our commitment to product and technology as key drivers of our growth at this pivotal time in our refounding journey,” LivingSocial CEO Gautam Thakar said in a statement.
Before coming to LivingSocial, Macey served as chief product officer at Rosetta Stone, where he developed learning programs outside of the company’s traditional language market. He’s also worked as a consultant and got his start as a web technologist at Razorfish.
—Will Friedman is the new president of Seattle-based Cozi. The family-coordination app maker has increased its user base by 50 percent since it was bought by Time Inc. last year. Friedman helped drive some of that growth as chief product officer, but he’ll also oversee the company as it builds products for other Time Inc. properties.
For example, Cozi built the backend for the publisher’s MyRecipes site and is working on the Cooking Light Diet software. The current Cozi app is still being maintained by the company as well, providing families a way to track activities and schedules, as well as share shopping lists.
Before his tenure at Cozi, Friedman helped develop what would become Bing Maps and worked on various other projects at Microsoft. He also led European business development at mobile startups HeyAnita and PocketThis.
—Qumulo hired Matthew Frey as its new chief financial officer. The Seattle-based enterprise data storage startup raised $40 million earlier this year to bring its data-aware scale-out NAS to market.
“We are thrilled to welcome Matt to our world-class team,” Qumulo CEO Peter Godman said in a press release. “His proven ability to negotiate with, sell to and support software solutions at some of the world’s largest corporations will play a key role in helping Qumulo become the company that the world trusts to store, manage, and curate its data, forever.”
Frey is coming from Optimum Energy, where he served as CEO of the software company. He also sat on the board of Vitesse Semiconductor before the semiconductor company was acquired by Microsemi Corp. Before that, he was the COO of World Wide Packets, where he raised $68 million in venture equity and debt before Ciena Corp. bought the company.
Frey build growth as Qumulo continues to gain traction in the crowded cloud storage space.
—Biamp, the Beaverton, Ore.-based audio technology company, announced Sally Blank will join the company as director of sales development, focusing on selling its integrated real-time and asynchronous communications systems.
“[Blank] brings a wealth of experience in global sales channel management and an impressive background in B2B sales of professional audio and video equipment,” said Biamp global sales head Ron Camden. “Her recent success in fostering partnerships within the area of unified communication and collaboration will be especially valuable to Biamp as we continue to expand into the space.”
Blank previously lead international sales for Vaddio’s specialty cameras, which offers a full suite of unified communication equipment.
