Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Boston Tech Talent Shifts April 2014

People shifting

Several new roles at both startup and established companies were filled by experienced Technology Executives in the month of April.


pete Martin

Pete Martin moved from the VP Engineering role at Skillz to take the newly created VP Engineering role at Pixability.






Jeff Palmucci, previously of MIT and the Revisionator became Director, Machine Intelligence at TripAdvisor.






Dennis Doughty left Jumptap to become VP Technology at Blade the new Boston based startup incubator founded  by Paul English.









Gwyn Fisher previously of Klocwork became VP Engineering, Content and Personalization at TripAdvisor.








Craig Morrissey moved from the Director Engineering role at Sonian to take the newly created VP Engineering role at Owncloud.



Monday, April 7, 2014

You Don't Need a Technical Co-Founder to Receive Funding



At least that is what we have seen recently. Is there a trend starting where companies are getting Series A investments from top tier VC's without a technical co-founder to run the product engineering?

Not sure if it is a trend, but we have run into a couple of companies recently that were able to achieve their first round of funding without the benefit of someone running the engineering team.

In some ways it makes sense. The risk in web startups is not usually a technical one. It is mostly assumed that these applications can be built and the technology challenge is minimal. The risk is that the companies will ever receive traction, acquire users and generate significant revenue.

Both of these startups had significant revenue traction and a scalable business model. The products were developed with outside agencies and web development firms using seed money. Only after they had closed their Series A, have they begun the search for their VP of Engineering.

What do you think? Will we see this more often in the future or is this an anomaly?

Once the fundings have been publicly announced we will update this post with the names of the companies.