— Microsoft’s U.S. President Kate Johnson and U.S. Government & Regulated Industries President Toni Townes-Whitley are leaving the company.
The company confirmed both departures and said a search for Townes-Whitley’s replacement is underway. Deb Cupp will take over for Johnson as the head of Microsoft’s U.S. subsidiary. Cupp is currently CVP of enterprise and commercial industries.
A Microsoft spokesperson said both executives left the company for personal reasons. “We are deeply grateful for their respective contributions and wish them all the best in the future,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
In a post on LinkedIn, Johnson said she’ll leave after helping her successor as Microsoft kicks off its new fiscal year this quarter.
“Then I plan to take some great advice that I got last year and just ‘be still’ for a while, imagining the possibilities for how I might contribute – meaningfully and differently – to the world around me. Stay tuned,” she wrote.
Johnson will depart September 1 and Townes-Whitley will leave at the end of September, according to ZDNet, which first reported the departures yesterday.
Prior to joining Microsoft in 2017, Johnson was a VP at General Electric and previously an executive at Oracle and Red Hat. She currently serves on the board of UPS.
Townes-Whitley joined Microsoft in 2015 as corporate vice president of industry. She is the former president of consultancy CGI.
— Boeing announced Brian West as its new CFO effective August 27.
He will succeed Greg Smith who announced earlier this year he will retire on July 9. Boeing SVP and Treasurer Dave Dohnalek will serve as interim CFO.
West is currently EVP and CFO at Refinitiv. He was previously chief financial officer and an executive at Oscar Health Insurance, Nielsen and GE Aviation.
— Bugcrowd, a San Francisco-based crowdsourced security platform, hired former SAP Concur Senior Director Ellie Wu as VP of customer experience.
In addition to managing the customer experience transformation team as SAP Concur, Wu was previously a customer success strategy leader at Smartsheet.
— Seattle startup Knock hired Jennifer Haas as chief revenue officer. She is based in California.
Haas was most recently EVP of sales and marketing at health tech startup Noteworth. She was previously a senior sales leader at Oracle and HP.
Knock provides software for apartment property managers and raised $20 million in funding earlier this year.
— Microsoft alum Jeremy Showalter will be stepping down as CEO of Pique following the acquisition of the AI startup’s intellectual property by Vietnamese payment app MoMo.
Showalter was named CEO in January 2020 and is based in the Seattle area. He was also an angel investor in Pique.
Founded in 2016, Pique raised an undisclosed amount in a 2019 seed round. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
from GeekWire https://www.geekwire.com/2021/tech-moves-microsoft-presidents-depart-boeing-names-new-cfo/