—Elise Worthy left Ada Developers Academy, the women-only coding school she co-founded, to get back into building software.
“Founding Ada was a passion project and something I wanted to do to give back to Seattle’s tech community, but not a long-term career option,” Worthy told GeekWire. “It was important to see Ada past its infancy, and it’s blown away all expectations: from acquiring major sponsors like Amazon, Microsoft, and Expedia, to the spin out from the Technology Alliance and the new key hire of Cynthia Tee as Executive Director. Given this momentum, it was a great time for me to get back to being a technologist.”
Worthy is currently consulting with Amazon’s Creative Services user experience team and spending time with her son. However, she tells GeekWire she’s not out of the startup game yet: she hopes to have a technical co-founder role in the next year.
—Apptentive snagged former Zomato chief technical officer Charlie Morss, bringing him on as vice president of engineering. The Seattle-based Apptentive creates tools to help mobile app makers hold onto customers and boost reviews.
I just accepted a VP of Eng position with @Apptentive! Great company, great product and a great culture. I'm thrilled to death!
— Charlie Morss (@cmorss) October 12, 2015
Morss previously served as CTO of Seattle-based Urbanspoon before it was purchased by Zomato earlier this year, and he held Zomato’s CTO position until August. Zomato closed down Urbanspoon in June and shuttered its Seattle office among widespread cuts earlier this week.
Urbanspoon was a previous client of Apptentive.
—Pro.com hired Shalendra Chhabra to head the company’s Text-a-Pro service. As general manager, he oversees the Seattle-based startup’s messaging services, including its recent foray into Facebook Messenger.
Chhabra has been a general manager at Pro.com since July, but was in stealth mode before the debut Text-a-Pro and its Facebook integration.
Chhabra departed from his director of marketing position at Indix earlier this year. Before that, he managed projects at Swype, Clipboard and Microsoft, where he worked on junk email filters and what would become Xbox Music.
—CareCap added two new members to its board of advisors. Acucela CEO Ryo Kubota and Elliott Bay Asses Solutions principal Bill Weisfield will help guide the Bellevue, Wash.-based cloud payment and financing platform’s growth.
“Dr. Kubota has enormous experience that is invaluable to CareCap as we grow,” said CareCap president and CEO Nevil Hermer. “In Mr. Weisfield, it would be difficult to find a more successful, experienced and creative executive—someone who has turned around the family jewelry company as well as run a successful asset advisory company along with operating at the C-level in multiple companies.”
Kubota helped bring Seattle-based ophthalmic biotech firm Acucela public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and helped raised more than $400 million for the company while establishing strategic partnerships around the world.
Weisfield currently works as a consultant, but has served as CEO of multiple companies including Flow Energy and UtilX Corp. He also serves on the board of The Bank of Montreal, the Downtown Seattle Association, Lindal Cedar Homes and Bayley Construction Company.
—Alert Logic hired Prabuddha Biswas as the data security company’s chief technical officer. The Houston-based company has seen strong growth in providing security solutions for the cloud.
Revenues for the security-as-a-service provider were up nearly 40 percent year-over-year for the third quarter, reaching more than $20.8 million. The company has about 20 employees at its Seattle offices, with 550 worldwide.
Biswas brings nearly 30 years of engineering and research experience to the firm. He’s held executive engineering positions at Medio Systems, Smartdesktop, Amazon and Oracle.
—PushSpring recruited Prestons Hillman as the company’s first principal data scientist. Hillman will help Seattle-based PushSpring grow its mobile app data tracking platform.
“Preston’s background in data science for advertising adds to our data team’s singular focus on effectiveness and performance of our data products,” said PushSpring co-founder and CTO Steve Dossick.
Hillman previously served as principal data scientist at call tracker Marchex, where he worked for the past two years. Before that, he worked at Bellevue-based DS-IQ, Atlas and Microsoft.
