Grant Ries, who was an investor during both the angel and Series A funding rounds at Convoy, was so impressed by the Seattle-based on-demand trucking startup that he decided to accept a position with the company.
Ries is now the chief business officer and his goal is to help Convoy scale to handle demand for its services. As an investor, he watched the company grow for a year before CEO Dan Lewis convinced him to come aboard.
“Convoy is going to revolutionize the trucking industry,” Ries said. “The team is amazing and they’re solving a huge problem and removing friction from, traditionally, a very manual process.”
An early advisor at Arivale, Ries helped the scientific wellness company develop its enterprise go-to-market strategy. Prior to that he was a vice president at Oracle, where he helped launch the Oracle Data Cloud, a global business unit that now has over 1,000 people. He was also part of a team that purchased Datalogix, a data and analytics company in the digital marketing sector, and integrated it into the Oracle Data Cloud.
Ries joined Oracle after the acquisition of BlueKai, a company he co-founded in 2008.
“Now that I’m on board in an operating role, I’m even more blown away by how big — and immediate — Convoy’s impact will be on the trucking industry,” Ries said. “Both for the shippers — some of the largest in the world who are now Convoy customers — but also for the truckers, whose lives we are improving.”
— HomeAway, the Austin, Texas-based vacation rental company, announced Monday that John Kim will become the company’s new president. Co-founder and current CEO Brian Sharples is moving into the role of chairman through January.
“While it’s never easy to hand over the reins of something you built, I believe now is the right time to empower the next generation of leadership as we continue the hard work of transitioning to an online transaction model,” Sharples said in a news release. “John is already an incredible force within HomeAway, and I’m very comforted in knowing we have someone of such caliber to lead our overall mission.”
HomeAway was founded in 2005 and became part of Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia in December.
Kim joined HomeAway in early 2016 as chief e-commerce officer. He previously served as the chief product officer for Expedia, leading global product development efforts for the Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, AirAsiaGo brands as well as for end-to-end hotel, air, car, and activities supplier systems.
— PayScale, the Seattle-based online salary comparison company, has hired Carl Oliveri as vice president of enterprise sales.
Oliveri was previously senior vice president of sales at TimeTrade, a provider of SaaS appointment scheduling solutions for businesses. He was also vice president of sales at the employee engagement platform company WeSpire. And he worked in IBM’s Kenexa Compensation department (and previously at Salary.com) for six years.
“Large organizations have traditionally relied on expensive consultancies to determine compensation, but these customers are now looking for solutions that incorporate real-time market data and sophisticated analytics to ensure they attract and retain employees, particularly in volatile talent markets,” PayScale CEO Mike Metzger said in a news release. “Carl has a proven track record of building effective sales programs and teams directed at many of the world’s largest companies, making him the right person to drive our enterprise sales efforts. We’re thrilled to have him join our leadership team as PayScale pursues the existing opportunity for modern compensation solutions with enterprise customers.”
— Ziad Ismail, chief product officer at Marchex, the Seattle-based mobile advertising analytics company, resigned his position effective Sept. 23, according to a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Ismail had been in the role since April, according to his LinkedIn profile. He joined the company in 2011 and had previously served as senior director of product management, vice president of product, and senior vice president of product and engineering.
