— James Phillips, a former corporate vice president and president at Microsoft, joined Google Cloud as a vice president.
Phillips left Microsoft last year after spending a decade at the Redmond, Wash., tech giant where his organization grew from 300 people to more than 15,000. He led teams working on various cloud-related services and platforms, including Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and the Azure AI Platform.
In a post on LinkedIn, Phillips said the depth of talent at Google Cloud is “staggering” and said the “energy and momentum is palpable and contagious.”
“I can’t imagine a more powerful foundation for enterprise digital transformation,” he wrote. “For the foreseeable future, transformation will be all about information and AI … and at its very core that’s what Google is all about.”
Google Cloud revenue rose 28% to more than $8 billion in the second quarter. The cloud arm of Google, which competes with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, boosted its operating profits to $395 million, a improvement of close to $1 billion from its loss of $590 million in the same quarter a year ago.
Last year, Phillips joined Stripe after leaving Microsoft but departed one month later.
Phillips previously co-founded Akimbi Systems, which was acquired by VMWare, and helped launch Couchbase. He is also a strategic director at Madrona Venture Group, which recently hosted Phillips on its podcast.
Phillips was a board member at Seattle-based F5 but the company announced this week that he was stepping down.
— TV advertising measurement company iSpot.tv appointed Leslie Wood as chief research officer. She will oversee the Seattle startup’s data science department for TV and video measurement products.
Wood previously worked as chief research officer at NCSolutions, a Nielsen-owned agency that helps consumer packaged goods companies target and measure advertising. She held the position for more than a decade.
Prior to NCSolutions, Wood owned and operated LWR, an industry research consulting firm. She won the 2023 American Marketing Association’s Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Award on Thursday.
“Leslie Wood has been recognized as one of the most respected names in the media industry,” iSpot CEO and founder Sean Muller said in a statement.
iSpot ranks No. 11 on the GeekWire 200, our list of the top privately held companies in the Pacific Northwest. The company raised $325 million last year from Goldman Sachs.
— Kalungi, a Seattle-area marketing agency for business-to-business software companies, appointed Brian Graf as its new CEO. A University of Washington graduate, Graf has led marketing efforts for more than 20 software companies and most recently worked as Kalungi’s chief marketing officer team lead. He replaces co-founder Fadi George, who will transition to CTO and remain as president of the board.
—Brian Bosché, who recently stepped down from his role as director of marketing at Smartsheet, joined London startup Move.ai as vice president of marketing and revenue. Bosché previously co-founded Slope, a startup that helped companies manage their creative project production processes and was acquired by Smartsheet in 2019.
