— Adriane Brown, managing partner at Seattle VC firm Flying Fish, joined the board of global investment firm KKR.
This is Brown’s second notable board appointment this year after she joined the American Airlines board in March. She also currently serves on the boards of Axon, eBay and the Washington Research Foundation.
Brown is an advisor for The Black Boardroom Initiative, a new effort from Perkins Coie that launched this month to increase the number of Black leaders on public boards to one in eight by 2028 — up from one in 24 today.
Brown previously served as president and COO of Intellectual Ventures, and president of Honeywell Transportation Systems.
KKR currently has $367 billion under management and 116 portfolio companies in its private equity funds.
— Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was unanimously elected to become chairman of the Redmond tech giant’s board. Nadella replaces independent director John Thompson, who will remain on the board. Read the story.
— F5 Networks named Equinix Chief Information Security Officer and Microsoft alum Michael Montoya to its board of directors.
Montoya is responsible for Equinix’s global cybersecurity risk program. Prior to joining Equinix, he was SVP and chief information security officer at Digital Realty. Montoya spent more than a decade at Microsoft, most recently as chief cybersecurity officer for the Asia region.
Seattle-based F5 Networks beat expectations for its most recent fiscal quarter as it continues to expand beyond its traditional networking hardware business into software and services.
— Seattle-based Nautilus Biotechnology appointed Human Protein Atlas Director Emma Lundberg to its scientific advisory board. At the Human Protein Atlas mapping project, she oversees the Cell Atlas.
Lundberg is also currently a professor in cell biology proteomics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and a former visiting associate professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. The other scientific advisory board members are Ruedi Aebersold, Lee Hartwell and Joshua LaBaer.
Nautilus is developing a new way to analyze the proteome, the set of proteins in a biological sample. Founded in 2016, the company is led by Isilon Systems co-founder Sujal Patel and went public last week in a SPAC merger.
— Mobile marketplace OfferUp announced former Booking.com managing director Todd Dunlap as its new CEO. Current CEO and co-founder Nick Huzar will remain at the company as its new chief product officer. Read the story.
— University of Washington mathematician Tatiana Toro has been named the incoming director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI).
Toro joined UW as a professor in 1996 and will maintain her tenure there during the five-year director term which begins in August 2022.
MSRI is a collaborative mathematics research center based in Berkeley, Calif. It is supported by the National Science Foundation and National Security Agency.
— The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) announced Tim Mulligan will join the organization as chief human resources officer in August. Mulligan was most recently CHRO at Vulcan, Inc., the holding company of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Prior to joining Vulcan in 2017, Mulligan was CHRO for the San Diego Zoo.
All of Vulcan’s environmental big-data projects and teams moved over to AI2 earlier this year.
— Wireless charging startup Ossia appointed former Avalara CFO Jerry Goade as its new chief financial officer.
Goade was most recently CFO at Upgrade Labs, a biohacking health facility founded by Bulletproof 360 founder Dave Asprey. He also previously served as CFO for technology companies Changepoint and Tippr.
Last year Ossia landed a strategic investment from Toyota Group subsidiary Toyoda Gosei.
— Absolute Software, a publicly-traded security software company, named Edward Choi as SVP of global alliances. Choi was most recently corporate vice president of strategic alliances and business development at Samsung.
Headquartered in Vancouver, B.C., Absolute Software recently acquired Seattle-based security startup NetMotion for $340 million.
— LevelTen Energy appointed Ross Trenary as chief financial officer. He has held executive finance roles at 8minute Solar Energy, Clearway Energy Group and NRG Renew. The Seattle startup provides a clean energy marketplace and software for renewable energy RFPs and contracts.
— Elevate Capital Venture Partner Chris Bright launched Collector Part Exchange, a new online marketplace for collector car parts. Bright is the co-founder and former VP of marketing for legal technology company Zapproved.
Bright co-founded Collector Part Exchange with Aaron Laliberte, former VP of product at Zapproved, after observing the need for small car collector businesses and private sellers to shift to online sales. He will remain a venture partner at Portland, Ore.-based Elevate Capital.
— Former Madrona Venture Labs Investment Associate Colton Pace is now co-founder of Los Angeles real estate startup realAppeal. A graduate of the University of Washington, Pace was previously a data analyst at UW and investment analyst at Vulcan Capital.
Founded in 2020, realAppeal is a tax monitoring platform to help home and property owners avoid overpaying on their property taxes. The startup currently has five employees and recently closed a $1.75 million seed funding round led by Wonder Ventures. realAppeal will use the funds to expand into additional states.
— Infrastructure solutions firm HNTB named Catherine Hovell as senior project manager and associate vice president of its Northwest division. A professional engineer with her PhD in structural engineering from the University of Texas, Hovell will work on major transportation projects in the region.
