Less than a year after arriving at fast-growing Seattle daily deal startup Zulily, chief financial officer Michael Vernon has left the company, GeekWire has learned. Zulily CEO Darrell Cavens confirmed the news, but declined to discuss the specifics around the departure. Vernon joined Zulily last May from Big Fish Games, and at the time of the hiring we speculated that Vernon’s arrival could signal a potential IPO filing by the daily deal site for baby products. [Related: Here are 5 tech companies from Seattle that could take the IPO plunge in 2012]. Vernon previously served as CFO of Zumobi and aQuantive, the online advertising giant that was acquired by Microsoft for $6 billion.
A replacement has not yet been named for Vernon. Zulily raised a $43 million venture capital round last year from Maveron and Meritech that valued the company at about $750 million. The company has kept a low profile despite amazing growth, though Cavens declined to offer any specifics about current employee count or other metrics.
Limeade, which builds Web-based health and wellness programs for companies, has named Mary Pigatti senior vice president of operations and customer delight. Pigatti’s hiring is the latest in a string of new hires at the Bellevue company, which is led by former Intuit manager Henry Albrecht. “Mary’s passion for leading customers toward higher profits via healthy, happy employees is contagious. Her market knowledge is vast and her drive is legendary,” said Albrecht. Pigatti is a former general manager and vice president of the Johnson & Johnson unit Wellness & Prevention. Before that, she spent 10 years at Ceridian Corp. Limeade said that it has increased its staff by 175 percent in the past year.
Microsoft has hired former FTC attorney Randall Long, a federal regulator who led the investigations of Google’s buyouts of DoubleClick in 2007 and Admob in 2010, reports CNET News. Long, who previously worked in the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, will be a director in Microsoft’s regulatory affairs division out of D.C. The Wall Street Journal reports that the hiring is the latest by a tech company “as tit-for-tat antitrust allegations become a growing part of the companies’ struggle for an edge.”
Data I/O Corporation, a maker of manual and automated device programming systems, is looking for a new CEO after Frederick Hume announced plans to retire before the end of the year. The Redmond company has tapped executive search firm Korn Ferry to help find a replacement for the 69-year-old technology executive.
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