John Scrofano, a longtime Seattle entrepreneur and executive who most recently served as CEO of Seattle startup Garmentory, joined startup Remitly as director of new initiatives.
Scrofano co-founded and served as CEO of OneWed, which was split into two companies and sold in 2015. He then became the CEO of Garmentory, a TechStars Seattle company that offers a clothing marketplace for customers to buy directly from boutiques.
He joins Remitly, a mobile, international money transfer company, just six months after it raised a huge $115 million funding round. The company’s main customer base is immigrants living in the U.S. or other countries transferring funds to family living abroad.
“Remitly’s leadership, growth, and mission (I’m an immigrant kid) are incredibly compelling. As Director of New Initiatives, I get to work directly with Josh and Shivaas,” Scrofano told GeekWire in an email, referring to Remitly co-founders Josh Hug and Shivaas Gulati.
“The company, the role, and the resources to stand up new, big businesses, was an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Scrofano said. He’s known the founders of Remitly since 2011, since they both shared similar venture capital backer, Founder’s Co-op.
“John’s entrepreneurial drive and ability to develop new businesses will advance our vision to transform the lives of immigrants and their families by providing the most trusted financial service products on the planet. We are delighted to have him join,” Gulati, who leads engineering for new initiatives, said in an emailed statement.
Garmentory co-founder Sunil Gowda, a veteran of Expedia, Microsoft and Zillow, is now serving as Garmentory’s CEO. He previously held that role before Scrofano joined the company, and also served as chief technology officer under Scrofano.
— On-demand trucking company Convoy tapped a new senior director of engineering: Microsoft and Dropbox veteran Viraj Mody, who was most recently the site lead for Dropbox’s Seattle engineering office.
Mody spent more than five years as an engineer at Microsoft, working on Windows International and Windows Live Core. He then joined personal music streaming startup Audiogalaxy as a senior software engineer and moved to Dropbox when it acquired the company.
He led Dropbox’s Seattle engineering center since it officially opened in 2015, growing it from just a few engineers to a team of more than 100.
“Convoy’s leadership team, the vision and business opportunity ahead, and the broad engineering challenges that need to be tackled, were all strong motivators for me to make this move,” Mody said in a statement.
“I’ve spent time in San Francisco and seen what makes startups there unique, and I’ve leveraged Seattle’s strong talent landscape to build Dropbox’s Seattle office to 100+ engineers in ~3 years. I’m excited to bring these perspectives and experiences to help Convoy achieve its aspirations,” he said.
— Sales technology startup Outreach announced the addition of senior Microsoft data scientist Pavel Dmitriev as its new VP of data science.
Dmitriev spent eight years as a data scientist at Microsoft, where he used data science tools to improve projects including Bing and Windows OS. He previously spent time as a senior research engineer at Yahoo.
“Outreach presented me with an opportunity I couldn’t refuse – the chance to enable data and experimentation driven decision making from the ground up in a domain that has not seen much of it before,” Dmitriev said in a press release. “I am excited to create and enhance a data-based sales tool that will deliver actual dollars back to Outreach customers. Accurately measured financial ROI is the true future of data-driven sales optimization.”
— eBay-owned ticketing service StubHub appointed theBoardlist founder Sukhinder Singh Cassidy as its next president.
Singh Cassidy is an accomplished tech executive, who served as the president of Google’s Asia Pacific and Latin America operations for more than five years. She is the founder and chairman of theBoardlist, a service that helps private companies find female leaders to serve on boards of directors.
“Sukhinder is a strong, dynamic leader who has founded and grown online marketplaces throughout her career,” eBay CEO Devin Wenig said in a press release. “She is the right leader to lay the foundation for long term growth and continue StubHub’s international expansion while delivering outstanding fan experiences.”
Watch Singh Cassidy’s conversation with Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff at the 2017 GeekWire Summit in the video below:
— Greg Linden, a longtime Seattle leader in machine learning, has left Microsoft to take a sabbatical from tech work. Linden announced his departure in a LinkedIn post, where he also shared details of his recent return to working at Microsoft.
Linden led personalization efforts at Amazon in the tech giant’s formative years. He went on to found two companies of his own as well as serving as a machine learning expert at Microsoft and later Google. He returned to Microsoft in 2016 to work on experimentation in AI.
“I want to say, things were different this time at Microsoft,” Linden said. “Satya is in the middle of transforming the company, so the timing for having impact is fantastic, with many new doors opened to do things that would have been difficult just a few years ago. It’s not as if the transformation is done — there are plenty of annoyances and pain in most large organizations — but the early stages of a transformation like this can be a good time for big improvements as some changes are suddenly encouraged and some old barriers gone.”
“If your goal is doing something that matters for millions of people, there aren’t that many places you can do that. I know I had a large impact for the better during my time there,” he said.
— Blue Canoe Learning, the first startup to be accepted into the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s incubation program, hired three new leaders.
Michael Rawding joins the company as VP of global business development. He was most recently an executive recruiter at talent search company Spencer Stuart. Penny Williams, formerly the director of marketing at Seattle company Outreach, joins as VP of marketing. Longtime machine learning researcher Xiaoyun Wang will serve as a speech and machine learning scientist.
“These early hires are critical at our stage as we place bets in how we’ll grow in the coming months and years. I couldn’t be more excited by these three executives as Blue Canoe prepares for the next wave of growth,” Blue Canoe CEO and co-founder Sarah Daniels said in a press release.
— Marketing automation software company Act-On Software tapped longtime digital marketing executive Phil Sims as its new chief technology officer.
Sims was most recently the CTO of Michigan-based digital ad agency HelloWorld and has leadership experiences at marketing firms including Clear Channel Communications, The Cobalt Group and Constant Contact.
“As marketing undergoes a transformation to deliver individualization at scale, technologies like machine learning and AI will play a critical role,” Sims said in a press release. “Act-On has a vision that is well-positioned to deliver the next generation of technology for agile marketers and I am excited to lead the team bringing this market-changing technology to practitioners worldwide.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct Shivaas Gulati’s role at Remitly.
