You might have noticed that we haven’t blogged in a while. Why? Because we’ve been aggressively hiring. The reports are true. It’s brutally difficult and time consuming finding great tech talent, especially in and around Greater Boston. But I’m happy to say that our search efforts were worth it.
We’re now at plan for this wave of employees and we’ve built a great, talented team. As an added bonus, we’ve also attracted our first formal advisor. Let’s start there.
John Nguyen - Advisor
We’re very excited to welcome John Nguyen as an official advisor. John was the founder of Vlingo, a mobile speech company based in Cambridge, Mass. In 2006, Vlingo pioneered the concept of using voice to drive mobile phone commands. In essence, the company built one of the first “Siri”-type interfaces in its “Vlingo Virtual Assistant” and had over 13 million users. The company was soon acquired by speech recognition company Nuance Communications. John’s got a great eye (and ear) for building speech-based mobile interfaces.
Sean True – Director of Machine Learning
Our team is now rounded out in the area of machine learning (ML). We’re thrilled to welcome Sean True as our Director of ML. Sean brings almost 30 years of expertise in architecting and building production-grade machine learning environments for speech (Semantic Machines, Dragon), text (Safecore, Inboxer), and vision. Sean is eager to carry forward our vision to mine valuable information from native data in video and photos and to drive our speech, vision and ML efforts. Sean’s expertise also extends to innovative barbeque designs. Needless to say, we have certain folks here who are delighted about this particular skill set.
Catyn Piver Blum – Director of Customer Success
Another key hire is our new Director of Customer Success. Catyn Piver Blum cut her teeth on account onboarding at fast-growing, local firms HubSpot and Localytics. There she managed customer success for both strategic and growth accounts. Catyn brings great knowledge and repeatable plays for managing rollouts for our customers. Having Catyn onboard has accelerated the onboarding of our backlog of private Beta signups. Catyn also may or may not have been a bartender at one point, so, on the whole, we’re excited about all of the skills she brings to the company.
Paul MacLelland – Director of Enterprise Sales
Last but not least, Paul MacLelland has joined the team as our Director of Enterprise Sales. Paul has over 25 years of experience working in technology sales in a variety of industries. Paul was the founding salesperson at Vela Systems, the company I founded that provided solutions to the AEC space and was acquired by Autodesk. So Paul is very familiar with the challenges and benefits of bringing technology to construction. Most recently he worked at Multivista and therefore understands a thing or two about photo and video content.
We’re constantly looking for similar, talented folks so please feel free to contact us if you know someone that could be a great fit.