Dave Parker, a longtime leader in Seattle’s startup and investment community, is bringing two new projects to the city.
The first is Seven Peaks Ventures. Parker is joining the Bend, Ore., based investment fund as a venture partner and will open a new Seattle office for the firm focusing on seed and Series A funding for startups in the Seattle area.
“I’m excited to join Seven Peaks because the team is committed to investing both money and time in early stage tech companies to help the founders meet their growth goals,” Parker told GeekWire in an email. “A lot of firms talk about value added capital, very few provide it because it doesn’t scale well. But when you’re investing early stage the team needs more than just cash.”
Parker is also heading up the meetup group for founders called 6 Month Startup. Its focus is helping first-time founders go from an idea to a fully-fledged company in just six months, and it will start holding meetings in Seattle in October.
Parker described the project as “a founder development program that helps entrepreneurs think about their ideas differently — in some ways the way investors think about ideas (not that every idea requires an investment). When early stage founders have ideas they should use their limited cash to test the ideas — that’s why the program is inexpensive — and get feedback from mentors,” he said.
Parker’s former roles include leading Techstars’ Seattle Startup Week, serving as the CEO of Seattle-based coding bootcamp Code Fellows and consulting through his firm DKParker. He’s also an avid board member and adviser to several startups.
— Embattled ride sharing company Uber surprised everyone two weeks ago when it announced that former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi would take over as CEO. Now the company is doubling down on its Seattle connection with the addition of former Microsoftee Craig Campbell as its director of recruiting in Seattle and New York.
Campbell joins Uber straight from Microsoft, where he spent almost four years as the director of talent acquisition for the Windows devices group. He formerly served as the director of global staffing at Dolby Laboratories, worked on recruiting strategy at Starbucks and has held positions as a talent scout at Amazon and Microsoft.
At Uber, Campbell will be charged with leading recruiting for Seattle and New York, where the company already has offices, and potentially other North American cities as it continues to expand. He will also oversee the company’s college recruiting and recruiting-related initiatives of Uber’s diversity and inclusion program.
The job is sure to be a tricky one at the moment: Uber has faced several scandals over the past months, including allegations of widespread sexual harassment and a toxic corporate culture, which may make it hard to attract talent.
Still, Uber’s Seattle office seems to be thriving. It has been the powerhouse behind some of the company’s latest offerings, including Scheduled Rides, Movement, Cherami and Cadence.
“Uber is solving groundbreaking product and infrastructure challenges in so many areas — from mapping, to artificial intelligence, to machine learning, to self-driving vehicles, to freight logistics, and the list goes on,” Campbell said in a press release. “My work will focus on connecting the dots between world-class talent and world-class opportunities — opportunities that in many cases could be career defining for an engineer or product manager.”
He also gave a nod to the company’s renewed diversity efforts: “Uber has already taken meaningful steps to expand its inclusive hiring sensibility and the diversity of its workforce. I look forward to building on the company’s existing progress and positioning Uber as an industry leader.”
— Hiya, a Seattle startup that offers Internet-based phone services, announced it has added Nuance communications vet Chris Reiner as its VP of business development.
Reiner has a long history in the telecommunications world. He spent nine years as a VP at Voice Signal Technologies, which developed the tech that eventually became Apple’s Siri. He left the company when it was acquired by Nuance and spent several years as a VP of business development at mobile tech company Carrier IQ.
He then joined Nuance himself, where he oversaw mobile division sales and go-to-market strategy for six years. At Hiya, he will lead the company’s growth strategy, with a specific eye toward carrier and OEM partnerships.
“I was immediately impressed with the level of innovation going on at Hiya,” Reiner said in a statement. “I can see so much potential for this company to really change the way people communicate and I am so excited to help the team achieve that goal.”
— Marketing technology startup Bizible announced the addition of Jenn Steele as the company’s VP of product marketing.
Steele joins Bizible from Indix, a Seattle company that develops product information software, where she most recently served as the senior director of product marketing. She formerly spent two years in product marketing at Amazon and has also held positions at startups HubSpot and RecruitLoop.
“I’m super excited to have Jenn join us as we build out our executive team,” Bizible CEO Aaron Bird told GeekWire in an email. “We are seeing strong traction in the Enterprise and I’m excited to double down on product marketing and sales enablement to serve this segment.”
