Wistar Kay
Wistar Kay. (Via LinkedIn)

Wistar Kay, business development manager for the Washington State Department of Commerce, has announced her retirement effective Aug. 19, and Rob Fiddick has been named to take her place.

The agency’s Office of Economic Development and Competitiveness is based in Seattle and Fiddick will be working with Washington-based software and telecom companies to assist them with growing export sales and implementing their international business development strategies through a variety of overseas resources.

Prior to joining Commerce, Fiddick spent more than five years providing strategic trade policy advice to U.S. companies, many from the ICT industry, aimed at strengthening economic development as part of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

Fiddick previously worked with the Washington Council on International Trade (WCIT) and Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER).

Fifteen years ago, Kay said she was hired to start a program to help ICT companies export outside the U.S.

Rob Fiddick
Rob Fiddick. (Via LinkedIn)

“Over the years, the program I manage pivoted focus from Japan to China and now to Europe based on where measurable sales results can be influenced by our trade office services,” Kay told GeekWire. “I’ve seen our local client companies come, go and morph and these days I’ve been working with companies at an earlier stage in their development than ever. Its been a  great honor to work with companies from F5, Isilon, Impinj, INRIX, to Glympse, Tune, Syntonic, Tupl, and Buddy — I can go on and on. We learned a lot together.”

Kay said it’s been a “fascinating” run and she’s “delighted” to turn the program over to Fiddick.

“Rob is just as intrigued as I have been by the challenge of finding companies that have the opportunity to grow into foreign markets and then figuring out all the ways we can support that growth,” Kay said. “International trade brings in revenue from outside the US, and that is a powerful way to diversify our economy as well as help our companies compete on the global stage to grow into world leaders.”

Barbara Gordon.
Barbara Gordon.

Apptio, the Bellevue, Wash.-based provider of software and services for managing corporate IT departments, has expanded its executive leadership team with the addition of Barbara Gordon as chief customer officer and the promotion of Larry Blasko to chief revenue officer.

Both Gordon and Blasko will report directly to Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta, according to a news release from the company.

Gordon will be responsible for the company’s more than 300 customers — including 40 percent of the Fortune 100 — government agencies and enterprises across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. She has 25 years of experience leading sales organizations, including running the worldwide customer support organization for Microsoft as well as being chief operations officer for the Isilon division of EMC.

Larry Blasko.
Larry Blasko.

Blasko takes on driving revenue generation, channel strategy and sales excellence for the Apptio. He has more than 20 years of experience building and leading high performance sales teams in the enterprise software industry. Blasko joined Apptio in 2009 as vice president of sales and prior to that he was a vice president of sales for HP Software and senior vice president of sales for Opsware (now part of HP).

“With both Barbara’s hire and Larry’s expanded role, I’m excited about continuing to expand our focus on the Global 10,000 and further deepen our commitment to creating wildly successful customers,” Gupta said. “Customer success is at the center of everything that Apptio does and these executives will further accentuate that value.”

Stanley Kim
Stanley Kim.

Hiya, the Seattle-based startup born out of the Whitepages Caller ID app, has appointed Stanley Kim as chief operating officer and named Geoff Entress to the board of directors.

Kim will help lead Hiya’s Seattle team, overseeing core operations for the company across business development, engineering and product. Prior to Hiya, he was executive-in-residence at Shasta Ventures. He previously worked at Samsung and McKinsey & Company.

Kim was also founder and CEO of PANOP, a real-time optimization software company, which was sold to Broadbase Software, and he was founder and CEO of Trickplay, which developed embedded graphics software.

Geoff Entress
Geoff Entress.

Entress is the first appointee to serve on the Hiya board alongside CEO Alex Algard. The company says his “in-depth knowledge and years of expertise in the tech and startup community will be invaluable as we grow.”

Entress serves as both a managing director at Pioneer Square Labs and a venture partner with Voyager Capital. He is a 17-year angel investor in over 150 startups and is currently an advisor to several entrepreneurship programs and serves on the boards of several companies, including Bonanza and LiquidPlanner. Entress joined the board of Whitepages in 2013.

Gordon Brandt
Gordon Brandt. (Via LinkedIn)

PhaseRx, the Seattle-based biopharmaceutical company focused on treating children with life-threatening diseases, has appointed Gordon Brandt, M.D., as chief medical officer. The appointment comes after PhaseRx’s IPO in May.

Brandt is considered a recognized industry leader in clinical development, according to a company news release. He previously served as PhaseRx’s chief clinical advisor, and has been working with the company for five years.

Prior to that, he served as president and executive vice president of clinical research and medical affairs for Nastech Pharmaceutical Company Inc. (which became MDRNA Inc.), where he worked to develop nucleic acid therapeutics. He also worked at Sonus Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a developer of oncology drugs, where he held the positions of vice president, clinical and regulatory affairs, and director of medical affairs.

“We are very excited to welcome Dr. Brandt as our chief medical officer,” said Robert W. Overell, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer. “He is an accomplished executive experienced in the development of RNA therapeutics who brings years of experience in drug development, including preclinical, clinical and regulatory affairs.”

Mary Jesse
Mary Jesse. (Via LinkedIn)

Bsquare, the Bellevue, Wash.-based software company, has named Mary Jesse as a member of the board of directors to fill a vacancy.

Jesse will serve as class I director, which means her term of office will expire at the company’s 2019 annual shareholders meeting, according to a news release.

Jesse brings more than 30 years of executive experience in the technology sector including serving as board chair, director, chief executive officer, chief technology officer, chief strategy officer, vice-president, and founder.

From 2015 to present, Jesse has served as chief strategy officer for VRstudios, the virtual reality company based in Bellevue, where she oversees product and content development.

“Bsquare is thrilled to have Mary join the board of directors,” said CEO Jerry Chase. “She brings a demonstrated and successful track record of building and nurturing technology companies. We believe she will help to further strengthen our strategic vision and approach to the IoT market with our DataV IoT software offering. Mary will be a great addition to the board and be a strong contributor to the company’s culture of teamwork and innovation.”

Kevin Fink
Kevin Fink.

Shiftboard, Seattle-based makers of cloud-based tools for helping organizations manage worker schedules, has named Kevin Fink chief technology officer and vice president of engineering, and Bill Lange vice president of customer success.

Both additions to the executive team come on the heels of a $4 million funding round in March. According to a news release, the hires complete the build-out of the leadership team and Shiftboard will continue to grow rapidly, nearly doubling its employee headcount in 2016.

Fink most recently managed several engineering teams across a variety of business segments at Rightside, a spin-off of Demand Media. As co-founder and CTO at N2H2 he led the development of the company’s technology and played an active role in the company’s $65 million IPO.

Bill Lange
Bill Lange.

Lange was co-founder and CEO of Full Slate, an online appointment scheduling solution for small and medium-sized businesses, which was sold to Intuit in 2013. He has also held leadership roles at companies like Demandforce, Mixxer, and Qpass.

“We’re excited to welcome these proven leaders with such exceptional credentials to our team,” said Shiftboard CEO Sterling Wilson. “Kevin and Bill share our passion for taking what’s hard about scheduling and managing shift-based workers and making it easy.”

José Tazón
José Tazón.

Expedia‘s José Tazón has informed the company that he is leaving the board of directors, effective upon the election of his successor.

The news turned up in a SEC Form 8-K, which noted that Tazón’s decision to resign “was not the result of any disagreement” between Tazón and the company.

Tazon has been a director at Expedia since March 2009, according to his bio on the company website. He is also non-executive chairman of the board of directors of Amadeus IT Group S.A., a provider of IT solutions to the travel and tourism industry.

Mark Johnson
Mark Johnson

Prior to joining Amadeus, Tazón worked at Iberian Airlines from 1975 until 1987, where he served as head of systems planning.

— Bellevue-based VoiceBox Technologies has named computational linguist and cognitive scientist Dr. Mark Johnson as chief scientific officer of the company’s Australia office. Johnson, who earned a PhD from Stanford University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, holds a professorship at Macquarie University.

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