— Online clothing rental startup Armoire hired Seattle investor and Microsoft veteran Laura Butler as its chief technology officer.
Butler spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, starting as an engineering intern and becoming the first female distinguished engineer and technical fellow at the company. Most recently, she was the chief technology officer and co-founder of UpLift Group, a startup that provided input about homeowner associations to buyers and their agents.
Butler also invests in companies and firms founded by women and minorities, including Graham & Walker, First Row Partners, Operator Collective, OwnTrail, PredictionStrike and LoanSense.
Armoire CEO and co-founder Ambika Singh called Butler one of her “true-life heroines.”
“We are the woman-behind-the-woman for our members: Laura’s ability to operationalize this vision into our service will transform our commitment to our customers beyond what I had previously imagined to be possible,” she said in a statement.
Founded in 2016, Armoire offers online and in-person shopping options, and last year opened a high-tech brick-and-mortar boutique in Seattle. The startup has raised more than $12 million to date.
“I’m thrilled to join a company founded by women and led by women, delivering convenient and cost-effective confidence to women,” Butler said in a statement.
— Michael Hyman is now a vice president at Chewy after the pet e-commerce company acquired Petabyte Technology, the Seattle-area veterinary services startup Hyman co-founded in 2019 and led as CEO.
Before starting Petabyte, Hyman was an executive at Oath, the company created through the merger of AOL and Yahoo. He also worked at Amazon in the early 2000s, at Microsoft in the late 1990s, and held leadership roles at several startups.
Chewy completed its acquisition of Petabyte, which builds tech products for pet care, on Nov. 4. It paid $43.4 million, according to a regulatory filing.
— Five years after its acquisition by Amazon, smart doorbell and home security technology company Ring named a new CEO: Elizabeth (Liz) Hamren, a former executive in Meta’s Oculus division and Microsoft’s Xbox business, who was most recently chief operating officer for social messaging platform Discord. Read more.
— Howard McKenzie is taking over from Greg Hyslop as Boeing’s chief engineer and executive vice president, engineering, test and technology.
Hyslop has led Boeing’s 57,000-employee global engineering team since 2019 and is retiring from the company after 40 years. He will become chief engineer emeritus and an advisor to CEO David Calhoun.
McKenzie was previously the top engineer at Boeing’s commercial airplanes unit, a role now filled by David Loffing, previously chief engineer of Boeing’s 777X airplane.
— Bellevue, Wash.-based professional services company Inviso Corporation appointed David Lazarus as CEO. Lazarus was previously vice president at the company, which he joined more than 14 years ago.
Martin Wolfram stepped down from the CEO role he held since Inviso’s founding in 2004 and is now executive chairman. Inviso provides services related to Microsoft Azure, business intelligence, staffing and marketing.
Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:
- Merchandise agency Bensussen Deutsch & Associates promoted Rob Martin from chief operating officer to the newly created role of chief experience officer. BD&A employs 239 people in the Seattle area, where Martin is based.
- Washington Gov. Jay Inslee appointed Kendrick Stewart as interim director of the Washington State Department of Commerce. Stewart is currently deputy director of the agency’s Organizational Health, Equity and Performance Division and will take on the new role March 4 upon the departure of Lisa Brown from the post.
- Kendee Yamaguchi has been appointed to a leadership role within the U.S. Department of Commerce. Yamaguchi was previously a Seattle deputy mayor, executive director of Snohomish County and an assistant director at Washington state’s Department of Commerce.
- Seattle-based Amy Bann, a former director of sustainability strategy at Boeing who is currently an executive at Xpansiv, joined the board of Denver-based BioCoTech Americas, a clean-tech waste technology company.
- Seattle biotech company Kineta appointed Myriam Chalabi, a medical oncologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, and Evan Ya-Wen Yu, a University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center professor, to its scientific advisory board.
- Pete Warsinske moved from CBRE to Seattle-based commercial real estate firm Flinn Ferguson Cresa, where he will lead the life science practice group in the Pacific Northwest.
