—Tim Ellis is trading in one online real estate company for another. Ellis, who has worked for Redfin and writes the Seattle Bubble blog, has just taken on a new role at Seattle home improvement Web site Porch.
“In moving to Porch my professional life is mirroring my personal life,” Ellis tells GeekWire. “When I started at Redfin I was a homebuyer in the midst of the world’s longest home search (2005-2011). Since buying a home in mid-2011, my interest in homebuying has waned a little (although I still keep up Seattle Bubble, and fully intend to continue to do so), while my interest in home improvement and maintenance is through the roof, so to speak.”
Ellis, also known as “The Tim,” first read about Porch when GeekWire wrote about the company’s $6.25 million funding round. He notes that he’s very excited about Porch’s “data-driven approach to the home improvement.” That’s an area with some big-time rivals, namely Zillow’s new Digs offering and Silicon Valley startup Houzz.
More about the new position, described as a data journalist, in this blog post from Ellis.
—Seattle supercomputer maker Cray has named John Josephakis to the position of vice president of worldwide sales. He previously worked at DataDirect Networks. “John has a strong, proven track record, and his successes in the HPC and storage markets will be immensely valuable to Cray as we work to scale our business and extend our leadership position in supercomputing to the big data analytics, storage and cluster markets,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.
—Nancy Hurley left the CEO post at Bocada in June. The Kirkland maker of data recovery products is now led by chier operating officer Kim Read. Former CEO and current chairman Mark Silverman also is playing a role in the company’s strategy and sales efforts.
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