Zac Cohn
Zac Cohn

—Arriving in Seattle five years ago, Zachary Cohn plugged himself into nearly every facet of the startup community. A past GeekWire Geek of the Week, Cohn hosted regular hacker meetups, served as a partner at LIFFFT and was one of the core team members at Startup Weekend.  He most recently led his own government tech consulting company, Wonful.

But now Cohn, who also created the airfare tracking app Amazing Airfare and holds a computer science studies degree from Rochester Institute of Technology, is headed to D.C.

Cohn was recruited by former U.S. CTO Todd Park to join digital government upstart 18F, which provides consulting services designed to improve how government works.

“Their mission is to help federal agencies build and buy modern, user-centric, technology and digital services,” said Cohn. “Basically – bringing the federal government into the 21st century.”

In fact, Cohn said the job will be similar to the consulting work he was doing with the State of Washington, where he was instructing the state government on lean development principles. As part of that project, Cohn helped the state merge three IT organizations. He will work at 18F as part of a two-year appointment, so Cohn notes “there’s not a lot of time to save the world. I’ll have to hit the ground running.”

Doug Bowser
Doug Bowser

—Nintendo of America hired Doug Bowser to lead the U.S. sales organization, overseeing sales, in-store merchandising, retail strategy and retail marketing for the game maker. Bowser, who has worked at Electronic Arts since 2007, will will report to Scott Moffitt, Nintendo of America’s Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing.

“Doug Bowser is an outstanding addition to our Nintendo team, as he brings a deep blend of both consumer package goods and video game sales experience,” said Moffitt. “I know he will work tirelessly with our internal and external partners to ensure the broad Nintendo product lineup of hardware, software and accessories are strongly represented throughout U.S. retail points of distribution.”

Rahul Sood at Startupday 2015
Rahul Sood at GeekWire Startup Day.

—Toronto startup BitGold, which is working on a cross-border payment system that uses gold and is developing a micropayment system for eSports and other areas, named former Microsoft Ventures head Rahul Sood and Hootsuite co-founder Dario Meli to its technical advisory board. Sood now serves as CEO of Seattle-based Unikrn, a venture-backed startup operating in the eSports arena. Meli is head of content strategy and analytics service Quietly.

“Dario and Rahul are well placed to advise on the technology, relationships, and business applications of P2P micropayments in social and eSports respectively. Dario and Rahul are Canadian entrepreneurs that have built globally successful internet businesses from the ground up. We are thrilled to have them involved in BitGold,” said Roy Sebag, who serves as CEO of BitGold.

Bill Glenn
Bill Glenn

—Rightside, the publicly-traded Kirkland-based domain name services company, tapped Bill Glenn as vice president of marketing. Glenn previously served as vice president of marketing at Seattle startup Socrata, and before that worked at Bellevue-based Limeade as vice president of alliances. He’s also worked in marketing at Onyx, Concur and T-Mobile. He is a graduate of Miami University and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

“Bill’s experience developing and executing integrated marketing strategies will be a great asset as we move beyond our TLD (top-level domain) acquisition phase and focus more investment on driving awareness, education and adoption of our portfolio of 39 TLDs,” said Rightside CEO Taryn Naidu in a statement.

Robi Johnston
Robi Johnston

—Digital Fortress, a three-year-old independent operator of data centers in the Pacific Northwest, named Steve Voit as executive vice president of sales and Robi Johnston as vice president of operations. Digital Fortress operates two data centers in the Seattle area, comprising 63,000 square feet of space.

Voit joins the company T-Mobile, where he served as director of business and partner development. He previously workd at Impinj and Netmotion Wireless. Johnston joins Digital Fortress from 2nd Watch, the fast-growing Amazon Web Services consulting company. She has previously worked at EMC, New Bay, Nextel and T-Mobile.

—Seth Bernstein, the CEO of Paychex subsidiary Stromberg, resigned from the board of Outerwall on May 16th.

—Also on GeekWire: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos taps former Quidsi boss Maria Renz for top adviser role

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