— Startup founder and advisor Micah Baldwin has left Create33 and Madrona Venture Group.
“Together, we built something special,” Baldwin wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “The Create33 team is phenomenal, and will continue to shine pursuing our goal to grow the PNW ecosystem. I left without a plan. It was the right thing to do, and sometimes we are guided by what feels right without clarity for what’s next.”
Launched by Madrona Venture Group in 2018, Create33 is a center for entrepreneurs, offering a shared workspace, programming and other resources for building startups.
Baldwin was Create33’s original executive director. He founded and led the startup Graphicly and worked as a senior technical business development manager for Amazon Web Services before launching Create33 last year.
Rebecca Lovell, a veteran of the Seattle startup community who previously led the City of Seattle’s Office of Economic Development, has been in the role of Create33 executive director since September of last year. Others on the Create33 team are Jaren Schwartz and Emily Cangie, and Create33 is in the process of hiring a community manager, as well.
— Lauren Sato joined Ada Developers Academy as the organization’s first-ever CEO. She takes the reins from interim leader Christine Martin who joined the nonprofit after executive director Nicole Buchanan stepped down in January 2019.
Ada Developers Academy offers tuition-free coding school for women and people of diverse gender identities. The Seattle-based program, founded in 2013, is designed to develop diverse teams of software engineers through classroom and internship experience.
Sato was most recently VP of revenue at The Riveter and also held executive roles at RealSelf, Invest Canopy and Year Up Puget Sound. Stay tuned for more about Sato and her new role in an upcoming GeekWire profile.
— Business and nonprofit leader Nitin Mittal, a veteran of Microsoft, joined the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World as chief operating officer and chief strategy officer.
In his new role, Mittal is responsible for internal operations as well as systems that track the organization’s impact and developing its strategic plan. The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, based in New York, is a nonprofit organization established in 2017 to reduce deaths and diseases caused by smoking. The organization’s mission is to end smoking in this generation.
“Nitin is an accomplished organizational leader who brings an incredible wealth of experience to the Foundation,” said Derek Yach, president of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. “His past work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives us insights and knowledge from the world’s leading philanthropy that will help our organization develop more impactful programs.”
Since leaving Microsoft’s online advertising business in 2011, Mittal has held roles focused on global health and innovation. He managed the Global Good Fund, a partnership between Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures, and was a senior advisor at PATH. Mittal is also the founder of ConceptualEyes, a knowledge discovery platform for health and life sciences.
— Madhu Singh, chief legal officer at Foundry Law Group, is the new president of TiE Seattle.
A branch of global nonprofit The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), TiE Seattle was founded in 2000 as a network with roots in the South Asian community to support and promote entrepreneurship in the larger Seattle startup ecosystem.
Singh is a TiE Seattle board member and replaces Sharmilli Ghosh, who served as president for 2.5 years. Singh is also as an adjunct professor at Seattle University School of Law.
— Professor Radha Poovendran stepped down as chair of the University of Washington’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the end of his five-year service appointment. Poovendran will return to teaching and research, his focus is on wireless and sensor network security. He is the founding director of the Network Security Lab.
Professor Bruce Darling is now the interim chair while a committee evaluates internal candidates. A new chair will be appointed by Dean Nancy Allbritton in the coming months based on the committee’s recommendation.
Darling’s research area is photonics and nano devices, including sensor development, electronic materials and medical devices. He consults with startups on electronics product development and new device concepts.
In an end-of-year message, Poovendran said the UW ECE department “continues to be the #1 startup generator among all UW departments.”
