The Techee

In a move that demonstrates the "revolving door" between politics and business still being wide open, Ajit Pai, the former chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under Trump's administration, has landed a cushy job as a Partner at a leading private equity firm. Ajit Pai has taken a Partner position at Searchlight Capital Partners, a New York-based private equity firm with over $8 billion under management. His appointment comes just a few months after leaving the FCC following the administration change from Trump to Biden. Pai was at the FCC for nine years, first as a Commissioner nominated by Barack Obama then spent five years in that role before becoming Chairman of the commission appointed by Trump. Pai's tenure at the FCC was rocked by him overseeing the rollback of some net neutrality rules set in place under the Obama administration. That doing earned him a lot of opposition to the extremity of even a death threat . Another landmark event unde

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Bessemer enture Partners has made new major moves that include adding $3.3 billion of capital to its investment coffers and appointing Jeff Blackburn, a long-time top Amazon executive and lieutenant of Jeff Bezos who just recently announced his departure from Amazon, now as a partner at the venture firm. Bessemer raised $3.3 billion with two separate funds, the first a fund named BVP XI  that raised $2.475 billion and the second a fund named  BVP Century II that raised $825 million. The majority of the new funds will be used for early-stage investments consistent with Bessemer's practice of starting with seed and Series A rounds for companies and then following up with late-stage investments. Bessemer now counts Jeff Blackburn as a Partner, with Blackburn joining the firm after a 22-year career at Amazon where he rose to become one of the company's highest-ranking executives. Before announcing his departure just this month, Blackburn served

Velodyne Lidar, the leading maker of lidars for autonomous vehicles in the US, is in the midst of a leadership tussle that's seen its founder and biggest shareholder David Hall pushed out from his position of Chairman at the company along with his wife Marta Hall who held the position of Chief Marketing Officer at Velodyne. David and Marta Hall were pushed out from Velodyne after a board investigation that brought accusations of the couple behaving "inappropriately" and acting without "respect, honesty, integrity and candor” when interacting with other officers and directors at Velodyne as claimed by the company's board. As they were pushed out, Velodyne named a new Chairman and another new board director. In response to his ouster, Velodyne founder David Hall put out a press statement  accusing his company of staging a "boardroom ambush" to reprimand him and his wife "based on an opaque, secret investigation into baseless, unfounded claims".

Barely a month after a stock trading frenzy that sent the shares of video games and electronics retailer GameStop soaring high and highly volatile to then become the talk of the town, the company's chief financial officer (CFO) Jim Bell has announced his resignation from the company, with the reason behind his departure not stated. Bell who has served as GameStop's CFO for less than two years will step down from his role formally on March 26, 2021, and leave the company. He noticeably held the role of CFO for a short period and it's unclear if GameStop's recent stock market frenzy is a contributing factor to his departure. As Bell is resigning from GameStop, he isn't leaving on shaky grounds or at least monetarily-wise. According to filings, he'll be getting an upfront $15.8 million pay package when he departs, split into $2.8 million in severance and an immediate payout of restricted shares worth $13 million once he leaves.  Then, Bell could still collect an

Allbirds, a venture-backed startup that's carved a lucrative market for itself selling eco-friendly footwear, has added new board members including Emily Weiss, the founder and CEO of the popular venture-backed makeup brand Glossier. Weiss was added alongside Mandy Fields, the chief financial officer (CFO) of cosmetics brand e.l.f Beauty. With Weiss and Fields joining Allbirds' board, the eco-friendly footwear brand now counts eight members on its board. Though the new board additions may seemingly hint at cosmetics ambitions for Allbirds, the company's Co-CEO Tim Brown has clarified that it has no plans to get into that market. Likely, Weiss has been tapped for an Allbirds board position thanks to her position of founding and building a venture-backed, high-growth direct-to-consumer brand. It's notably her first board seat outside Glossier, the popular cosmetics brand she founded. Weiss built Glossier from the ground up starting from a beauty blog known as " Into

Enjoy Technology, an  online  electronics retailer founded by an executive who previously the head of Apple's retail business and also the CEO of retailer JCPenney, has moved to hire its first Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in what hints at plans to go public soon.  Enjoy has hired Fareed Khan as its CFO, with Khan joining the company from Parallel, a consumer goods company. Previously, Khan held respective roles as the CFO of the food giant Kellogg's and food distribution giant US Foods, which he guided through a public listing.  With Khan's experience in managing and guiding public companies as a finance head, it seems that Enjoy has hired him to help prepare it for a public listing. Enjoy is a venture-backed startup that's raised over $350 million in funding and it seems that its investors would likely be calling for an exit for their stakes in the company, wherein a public listing is one of the most common ways to do that. Fareed will oversee Enjoy's global finan

It seems that the revolving door between top government jobs and those in the high classes of the finance industry is still open, as Apollo Global Management, a private equity giant with over $455 billion under management, has appointed Jay Clayton as Lead Independent Director of its board. Clayton is  the former Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who served under the just concluded Trump administration. Apollo created a new role for Clayton, whose appointment comes shortly after the private equity firm's co-founder and long-time face of the company Leon Black penned his resignation after an investigation regarding his ties to the late American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Black was subject to an investigation after revelations of his dealings with Epstein that involved payments from Black to Epstein to the tune of $158 million . With Black's resignation, it seems that Clayton's appointment to a newly created role of Lead  I

The head of Microsoft's corporate venture capital arm, M12, is leaving the company after being hired by the SoftBank Vision Fund, the mammoth $100 billion investment fund formed by the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank. Nagraj Kashyap is leaving M12 to take on the role of managing partner at the SoftBank Vision Fund. Bloomberg News first reported of Kashyap's departure and new job on Monday. Joining SoftBank, Kayshap has made a significant step further in his venture capital and investment career that has spanned companies including Microsoft and the chipmaking giant Qualcomm. Before joining Microsoft in 2016 to head its corporate venture fund, Kayshap led Qualcomm Ventures for 12 years. Now, after long stints at the corporate venture arms of two tech giants, Kayshap is joining another venture arm of a tech conglomerate, this time a mammoth $100 billion fund that has deployed tens of billions of dollars into many technology companies. As a managing partner, Kayshap will over

In a very noteworthy move, Amazon's founder and long-time CEO Jeff Bezos has announced that he'll be stepping down from his role as CEO in the third quarter of 2021 and become the Executive Chairman of the e-commerce giant he founded. He'll be replaced by Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Andy Jassy has for long been considered the second in command and heir to the Amazon empire after Bezos and this has just been proven. As he steps down, Bezos says that he'll remain involved in Amazon initiatives but now spend more time on his other projects such as the aerospace company Blue Origin, newspaper The Washington Post, and philanthropic initiatives. Bezos will definitely be stepping down in grand style from the mere online bookstore he founded 27 years ago and built into a mammoth e-commerce and technology company. Taken public in 1997, Amazon is currently one of the most valuable publicly-traded companies worldwide, with a market cap of $1.7 trilli

Salesforce, the cloud enterprise software giant that's on the cusp of a deal to buy Slack for $28 billion , has shuffled its leadership team as the company's long-time chief financial officer, Mark Hawkins, has announced his departure. Hawkins is stepping down from the CFO role after over six years at Salesforce and leaving the company for said retirement. Hawkins is leaving after overseeing a period of unprecedented growth for Salesforce, wherein the company's market cap has burgeoned from around $30 billion in 2014 now to over $200 billion. As CFO, he has helped steer a lot of big acquisitions that drove Salesforce's growth. Hawkins will now be replaced in his role of CFO by Salesforce's chief legal officer, Amy Weaver. He'll remain Salesforce's CFO emeritus until October 2021 before he finally departs the company. Mark Hawkins Monetary-wise, Hawkins has done very well for himself, pulling in tens of millions of dollars in compensation over his six years

The chipmaking company Intel has chosen a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to replace its current leader Bob Swan who has held his role for two years. That new CEO is Pat Gelsinger who's famous for being the CEO of VMware since 2012. He'll now leave VMware to join Intel, a company that he previously worked at in a top position. Gelsinger is well-recognized for his leadership at VMware, during which he significantly transformed the company into a global leader in the cloud infrastructure and other related markets. During his eight-year tenure, VMware's annual revenue grew from $4.6 billion to $10.8 billion. Gelsinger isn't new to Intel as he was once the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the chipmaking company before leaving for EMC and then VMware. Now, he's coming back as the company's CEO, hoping to position it strongly in an era of transformations and improvements in the semiconductor industry. Gelsinger began his tech career at Intel and rose to become the

Gary Cohn, the former President of the banking firm Goldman Sachs and economic advisor to US President Donald Trump, has been appointed as the Vice Chairman of IBM, a press statement from the company notes. Cohn will join IBM's board and its Executive Leadership Team to work as an advisor to IBM's CEO, Arvind Krishna. IBM marks the seventh board position that Cohn will concurrently hold, the other six being Abyrx, Gro Intelligence, Indago, Nanopay, Starling, and Pallas Advisors. IBM particularly will mark the second major and publicly-traded company that Cohn will help guide, the first being Goldman Sachs where he served as President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) from 2006-2016. He left Goldman to take up a job at the Trump White House administration in 2017 but only lasted a year and a few months there. As a highly recognized name in the finance industry, Cohn marks a noteworthy addition to IBM's team.  "I am honored to be joining IBM, one of the world's most

The chipmaking giant Qualcomm has kicked off 2021 with a leadership change that entails its six-year running CEO Steve Mollenkopf stepping down this year. Mollenkopf has announced that he's retiring from Qualcomm effective on the 30th of June, 2020, and will handover the CEO position to Qualcomm's current President Cristiano Amon. Mollenkopf  is leaving Qualcomm after six years as CEO and 26 years employed with the company and handing over to an incoming CEO that's spent 25 years at Qualcomm and is the company's current President. Mollenkopf began working at Qualcomm in 1994 as an engineer and worked his way up to the CEO position with a tenure that saw Qualcomm strengthen itself as a leader in chipmaking for smartphones. He was also instrumental in diversifying Qualcomm from mobile into newer segments like IoT and Autos. Under  Mollenkopf, Qualcomm notably sparred with  Apple in a legal battle that ended in a lucrative settlement of at least $4.5 billion . He also fac

The cloud software giant VMware has filed a lawsuit against Rajiv Ramaswami, its former Chief Operating Officer (COO) who took up the job of CEO at a competing cloud company, Nutanix, just this December. VMware has filed a suit in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Santa Clara, against Ramaswami, alleging "material and ongoing breaches of his legal and contractual duties and obligations to VMware." VMware claims that Ramaswami secretly met with executives and board members of Nutanix in preparations to take up the job of CEO for "at least two months" before he left VMware and at the same period wherein he worked to shape VMware's strategic direction. VMware says that Ramaswami didn't disclose his meeting with Nutanix executives and board members which posed a conflict of interest given that Nutanix is a rival to VMware. "Mr. Ramaswami demonstrated poor judgement and had a clear and extended period of conflict of interest," VMw

Ginni Rometty, the former longtime CEO and Executive Chairman of IBM, will now step down from her role as Chairman effective on the 31st of December, 2020, IBM has announced . The role will be transferred to IBM's current CEO Arvind Krishna who has held his position for less than a year. Rometty had been IBM's chief executive officer since 2012 before she stepped down in January this year. During her tenure, she oversaw major changes and initiatives at IBM including the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat that marked IBM's biggest acquisition in its 200-year plus history. Rometty stepped down from her CEO position and handed the role to Krishna, an IBM veteran who has been with the company for three decades. Before becoming CEO, he had been a senior vice president at IBM and helped steer the company's acquisition of Red Hat. Recently, Krishna made a landmark decision, announcing a spin-off of IBM's $19 billion Managed Infrastructure Services business as a separate pu

The enterprise software giant Oracle has indicated in a filing to the SEC that it's relocated its headquarters from the state of California to Texas, making it the latest among a handful of companies that have moved their headquarters out of California this year. Oracle has changed its corporate headquarters from Redwood City in California to Austin in Texas. Oracle already has a huge campus in Austin with thousands of employees so it doesn't seem that the company will be making extensive employee relocations as it's moved to the city. The company has simply changed its corporate headquarters from Redwood City, where it houses 6,500 employees and is the largest employer in the city, to Austin where it opened a campus in 2018 that it said would house 10,000 employees. Oracle's move comes in a year wherein a Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated remote work across the US and provided more flexibility for employees, particularly those from the tech industry, to work from vary

The Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has told several of his close associates and friends that he's looking to officially move to the state of Texas, CNBC reports , whereas such a move wouldn't be surprising, given that Musk has hinted at moving to the state in the past. Earlier this year and in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Musk notably tweeted that the electric maker he chairs, Tesla, will move from California to Texas after he got into a spat with regulators in California over Covid-19 restrictions. Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependen on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2020 Also this year, Musk put up his seven California homes for sale  after tweeting that he's selling "almost all physical possessions" and "

The cybersecurity company Tanium and the IT giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are the latest companies to announce the move of their headquarters away from the state of California, with Tanium departing from the city of Oakland to Kirkland in the state of Washington and HPE departing from the city of San Jose to Houston in Texas. The move from Tanium and HPE comes as the acceleration of remote work spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic have made companies to reconsider staying in higher-cost cities. Tanium will now move to an office building in Kirkland that'll serve as its headquarters while HPE will maintain its already-large office presence in Houston but now as its headquarters. For HPE, the company says no layoffs will be made as part of its move and that it'll retain its Silicon Valley campus as a major R&D center. HPE notably employs tens of thousands of people worldwide with a majority in the US while Tanium employs a much lesser 1,500 people globally, also majorly

Ajit Pai, the current Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has formally announced plans to leave the commission when the next US administration led by President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on the 20th of January. He'll leave after three years as the FCC's Chairman and eight years in total serving at the commission. “It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve at the Federal Communications Commission, including as Chairman of the FCC over the past four years,” Pai said in a statement. “To be the first Asian-American to chair the FCC has been a particular privilege. As I often say: only in America.” Pai joined the FCC under the administration of then-President Barack Obama in May 2012. He was appointed five years later as the commission's Chairman under the [now outgoing] Trump administration.  As Chairman under Trump, Pai oversaw landmark events including the merger of the two telecom giants T-Mobile and Sprint. He notably put into place new measur

The CEOs of technology companies Splunk, Brex, and Dropbox are set to leave the city of San Francisco for other cities including Austin and Los Angeles, The Information reports . According to the technology news site, the CEOs of Dropbox and Splunk both recently purchased homes in the city of Austin, Texas and plan to make there their permanent residence.  Likewise, Brex's 20-something co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras have decamped to Los Angeles and don't plan to renew their fintech company's San Francisco office lease next year, The Information reports. The reported decampments from San Francisco point to a broader trend whereby a significant number of companies and entrepreneurs have left San Francisco, which is famous for housing numerous technology companies, to other cities. For such people, the city of Austin in Texas seems to be a major attraction and just recently took in a newcomer who is the Palantir co-founder and the founder of venture capi