— Diego Oppenheimer is now a partner and CEO-in-residence at venture capital firm and incubator Factory, which is opening a Seattle office.
Oppenheimer was previously CEO and co-founder of Seattle machine learning startup Algorithmia, which was acquired by DataRobot in July 2021. He remained at DataRobot until this September as vice president of machine learning operations.
Factory, based in Menlo Park, Calif., specializes in AI and machine learning. The firm launched in March 2021 and is led by Andy Jacques, previously an Apple executive and CEO of Lattice Data, along with Stanford computer scientist Chris Re, and Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Cadence Design Systems.
Oppenheimer will open the firm’s new Seattle office.
“My obsession with machine learning as a technology is not new,” Oppenheimer wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Are current MLOps tools still valid? Will new business models emerge? What does the future of the AI powered enterprise look like? An opportunity to answer some of these questions and continue working in this space was what I craved.”
Oppenheimer was previously at Microsoft for more than five years, where he helped design, manage and ship some of the company’s data products including Excel, Power Pivot, SQL Server and Power BI.
— Expedia Group hired two new executives: Brad Bentley as chief operating officer of Expedia Brands and Tript Singh Lambda as vice president of consumer product for Expedia Product & Technology.
Bentley was previously CEO and president of clean energy company Inspire. He also held leadership positions at WarnerMedia, AT&T Mobility, and DirecTV.
Singh Lambda moves to Expedia from Google, where he was head of product for YouTube Ad Monetization and User Personalization. He also previously spent more than 12 years at Microsoft, starting as a software engineer and rising to senior principal product manager lead, responsible for wireless connectivity of Windows and Windows Phone devices.
Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:
- Jon Roskill is now board chair at Swedish electric boat maker Xshore. Roskill stepped down as CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based business technology company Acumatica in February.
- Anne Bramman is stepping down as chief financial officer at Nordstrom. The company’s senior vice president and chief accounting officer Michael Maher will become interim chief financial officer when Bramman departs the company in December.
- Rachel Gonzalez, formerly general counsel at Starbucks, will serve as a board observer at vacation rental giant Vacasa. At next year’s annual stockholder meeting the company intends to seek approval to elect Gonzalez as an independent director.
