Just three months after it opened its new Seattle office, Airbnb is making an even stronger bet on the city with a top-level executive hire.
Vinayak Hegde, formerly the chief marketing officer at Groupon, will join Airbnb to lead performance marketing across all its businesses, the company announced Thursday. He will be based in Seattle.
Airbnb also announced the hire of longtime eBay, PayPal and Skype executive Laura Chambers, who will serve as the general manager of homes hosts, overseeing the company’s relationship with the hosts who use its platform. Chambers will be based in the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
Airbnb doubled down on its Seattle presence when it opened a 300-person office in the city in June. The office is home to employees in divisions including engineering, product management, design and research, a spokesperson said.
Hegde’s addition is yet another sign the company is invested in the region. His resume in the Seattle tech scene is a long tone: He spent the last six years leading marketing at Groupon, based in the company’s Seattle office. Before that, he spent twelve years at Amazon, serving as the company’s general manager of worldwide marketing for six of those years.
“Having stayed in Airbnbs in Paris, Barcelona and all over the United States, I’ve long admired Airbnb for its mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere and I am excited to join the company and its community,” Hegde said in a statement. “I see tremendous opportunity to further tell the story of Airbnb to travelers of every type and make Airbnb the worldwide homepage of travel.”
— Adam Feldstein, the longtime chief product officer at SEO company Moz, has left that role to serve as the vice president of product at trademark monitoring company BrandVerity, GeekWire has learned.
“We are thrilled that Adam Feldstein is joining BrandVerity as VP of Product,” BrandVerity CEO and co-founder David Naffziger told GeekWire in a statement. “He is a values-aligned leader that will contribute broadly to the company. He has deep experience growing Moz from an early stage startup to an industry leader and he has incredibly strong product leadership experience.”
Feldstein spent nearly a decade at Moz, leading product for the company as it grew from a small startup to $50 million in annual revenue. He previously spent more than ten years as a program manager at Microsoft.
“Adam has been an important part of the Moz story and we wish him well as he spreads TAGFEE values in his next role,” Moz CEO Sarah Bird told GeekWire in an email, adding that the company is looking for a new CPO to replace Feldstein.
— Cambia Health Solutions, a Portland, Ore.,-based network of companies focused on health innovation, is bolstering its c-suite with two new tech-focused hires.
Dr. Cheryl Pegus joins the company as its chief medical officer. Pegus has diverse experience across the healthcare industry, including executive positions related to technology at pharmacy Walgreens, insurance provider Aetna and Caluent, a healthcare data analytics company. She is also a cardiologist with 25 years of clinical experience.
Faraz Shafiq joins Cambia as the company’s chief artificial intelligence officer, leading one of the most fruitful areas of health technology today. Shafiq was most recently the global head of data science, AI and IoT at Verizon and previously the head of strategy and analytics for AT&T’s IoT platform. He has also held positions at Nokia, Google (Motorola) and the University of California, Berkely.
“Cambia is focused on accelerating change in an industry that has traditionally been slow to adopt or develop new innovations and technologies,” Cambia COO Jared Short said in a statement. “Bringing experts from diverse fields to challenge the status quo is essential if we want to successfully change the industry. Cheryl and Faraz’s unique talents and expertise will help us achieve our cause of creating a more person-focused, sustainable health care system and ensure we make good on our promise to put consumers at the center of everything we do.”
