Former Amazon, Microsoft engineers raise $120K for Seattle cloud startup Cloudshim

A new startup out of Seattle called Cloudshim just raised $120,000 to help grow the company’s self-serve cloud management platform.

Founded by two brothers who previously worked at Microsoft and Amazon — Lokesh Taneja and Vishal Taneja — Cloudshim aims to help companies manage cloud infrastructure services and track associated cloud costs.

“Most competitor products have gone upmarket, tailoring their product around enterprise requirements,” said Lokesh Taneja. “This has left a void to be filled for customers that just want a simple and quick way to manage their cloud without heavy contractual processes.”

The software currently supports Amazon Web Services users but will soon expand to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Black Lion Ventures was the sole investor in the “pre-seed” round. Cloudshim plans to raise a larger round in the next year. The company employs nine people.

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Tech Moves: Former Amazon VP Brad Porter joins Scale AI as CTO; Seattle startup Ally.io adds execs; and more

Brad Porter, who was until recently the Amazon Robotics leader, will become Scale AI’s first CTO. (Scale AI Photo)

— Brad Porter, the longtime Amazon robotics leader, has surfaced as the first chief technology officer of Scale AI, a San Francisco-based company seeking to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence through its machine learning technology for labeling data.

“As our CTO, Brad will help continue to improve the efficiency and sophistication of our technologies and processes by orders of magnitude, building new tools to continue to accelerate the development of AI systems,” wrote Alexandr Wang, the company’s CEO and founder, in a post Monday morning. “He will manage our entire technology stack, with combined ownership of product direction and engineering, to turbocharge our ambitious technology roadmap.”

Porter joined Amazon in 2007, and in 2014 became a distinguished engineer, an exclusive title given to only a handful of employees. In 2017, he became VP of Amazon Robotics, managing the company’s robotic technology operations in its warehouses and with other high-tech projects.

Alexandr Wang, Scale AI’s CEO and founder, dropped out of MIT to start the company. (Scale AI Photo)

“Will Scale be the next Amazon? Well, it will be for me,” writes Porter in a LinkedIn post today. “I’m joining Alex Wang and the team at Scale as CTO to help bring this vision to reality.”

Wang, who is in his early 20s, dropped out of MIT to found Scale AI in 2016. The company has raised more than $120 million in funding, and is reportedly valued at more than $1 billion.

“In many ways, this is the unsexy part of AI,” Porter writes. “The sexy parts of AI are the fancy algorithms and powerful silicon that allow AI practitioners to build a model that attempts to match the performance of humans. But if you don’t find a way to capture the performance of humans in an accurate and computer-understandable manner, it is extremely hard to build a model that matches that performance.”

Porter’s departure from Amazon was reported by Business Insider on Aug. 14 and subsequently confirmed by the company. Since then, Porter’s former Amazon boss, Dave Clark, senior vice president of worldwide operations, was named to succeed Jeff Wilke as Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer CEO, which resulted in a reshuffling of executives in Amazon’s operations and logistics division.

— Seattle Genetics announced Ted Love has joined its board of directors and Srinivas Akkaraju has resigned after service of more than 17 years. Love currently serves as president and CEO of Global Blood Therapeutics based in San Francisco.

Based in Bothell, Wash., Seattle Genetics produces drugs to fight cancer. It currently has two products on the market, and a third drug for breast cancer treatment that was approved by the FDA in April.

— Seattle startup Ally.io hired Atul Sahai as SVP of strategy and operations and Justine Lyon as SVP of sales. Both have experience at other SaaS startups in the Seattle region.

Sahai was most recently senior director of business strategy and operations at collaborative work management platform Smartsheet. He previously worked at Microsoft, HP and Altair.

Lyon spent more than 10 years at compensation software provider PayScale, most recently as VP of sales.

Ally.io’s software helps companies track and hit their goals. The company raised $15 million last year and won Startup of the Year at the 2020 GeekWire Awards.

— Chicago, Ill.-based Nerdio appointed former Microsoft executive Andy Lees to its board. Nerdio offers solutions for managed service providers on Microsoft Azure.

Lees spent 23 at Microsoft, including a decade in the U.K. subsidiary. He relocated to the tech giant’s Redmond, Wash. headquarters as a corporate vice president overseeing field marketing, North American sales and the Windows phone division among others. At the time of his departure in 2013, he was CVP of corporate strategy.

Robert Matthews (Swiftwater Group Photo).

— Robert Matthews, former Global Head of Integrated Marketing for Xbox, has left Microsoft and launched Swiftwater Group, a strategic marketing firm for brands and nonprofits. 

Matthews spent more than 11 years at Microsoft overseeing marketing strategy for the Redmond, Wash.-company’s global gaming business. Prior to Microsoft, he was head of consumer marketing at Nintendo during the launch of the Wii.

— Aerospace industry veterans Kelly Maloney and Jay Maloney have launched OLI Communications, a new Seattle-based strategic marketing, branding and operations firms. The new venture will provide services to companies in aerospace, space, medical, marine and other industrial sectors.

Kelly Maloney previously served as president and CEO of the Aerospace Futures Alliance and the Washington State Space Coalition. Jay Maloney spent more than 17 years at Boeing, most recently as VP of fleet management. Since departing in 2017, he’s served as president of Maloney Aerospace Advisors.

Sara Gonzalez (Burke Museum Photo).

— University of Washington Associate Professor of Anthropology Sara Gonzalez has joined the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture as a curator of archaeology. She is also an adjunct professor of American Indian studies.

In this new role, Gonzalez will curate and care for the museum’s archaeology collections and collaborate with U.S. Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities on archaeological and museum practices. Located on UW’s Seattle campus, the Burke Museum completed a three-year, $99 million expansion last year.

Editor’s note: This post previously cited Dr. Ekin Yasin’s new role at the UW — her appointment was covered in an earlier Tech Moves.

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Former Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Convoy leaders are building a secretive new Seattle startup

Linda Lian. (Madrona Venture Group Photo)

Four leaders from top Seattle tech companies are working together on a stealthy new startup.

Linda Lian, a former associate at Madrona Venture Group and senior product marketing manager at Amazon Web Services, is leading a group that also includes:

Tom Kleinpeter, most recently a principal engineer at Dropbox who sold a music streaming startup to the cloud giant in 2012.Francis Luu, a designer who spent 10 years at Facebook.Viraj Mody, formerly the engineering director at Dropbox and technical advisor to the CEO at Seattle startup Convoy.

The company is working on tools that help users build digital communities, according to a recent tweet from Lian. Lian declined to provide additional details when contacted by GeekWire.

Lian was previously a product marketing manager on the AWS Lambda team. She spent about a year at Madrona and formerly worked as a financial analyst at cybersecurity startup Lookout, as well as Morgan Stanley.

Mody previously led Dropbox’s Seattle office. He joined Convoy in 2018 as its senior director of engineering, then transitioned into a role advising CEO Dan Lewis. Convoy is building a digital freight network and is one of Seattle’s most valuable tech startups.

Kleinpeter sold two startups: Audiogalaxy to Dropbox and FolderShare to Microsoft in 2005. He spent nearly eight years at Dropbox.

Luu joined Facebook in 2009, working on products such as News Feed, Groups, and others.

We’ll update this story as we learn more about the new company.

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Convoy hires former Expedia CEO as president and COO as digital freight startup tops 1k employees

Mark Okerstrom, the former Expedia Group CEO, will become Seattle startup Convoy’s president and COO. (Convoy Photo)

Mark Okerstrom is shifting from travel and tourism to trucking, looking to apply his digital commerce expertise to a new marketplace.

The former Expedia Group CEO, who left the travel giant in an executive shakeup last year, is joining Convoy as the fast-growing Seattle startup’s new president and chief operating officer. Okerstrom will oversee Convoy’s finance, operations, marketing, supply and marketplace growth teams, working alongside  CEO and co-founder Dan Lewis.

The announcement comes as Convoy tops 1,000 employees, five years after it was founded by Lewis and CTO Grant Goodale. The company’s digital network is like ride-sharing for freight, matching shippers with truck drivers that have available space. Convoy is one of a handful of privately-held companies in the Seattle region valued at more than $1 billion, raising $400 million at a $2.7 billion valuation in September.

Convoy CEO Dan Lewis. (GeekWire Photo)

In an interview with GeekWire, Okerstrom said he first learned about Convoy early in the company’s history, when he was Expedia’s chief financial officer, sitting in the C-suite next to then-Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Now the CEO of Uber, Khosrowshahi was an early Convoy investor.

That history is very relevant now: Uber competes with Convoy through its Uber Freight business, so much that Khosrowshahi divested his stake in Convoy after he joined Uber, to avoid a conflict of interest. Uber listed Convoy among its competitors, along with Amazon.

“I first started tracking Conroy shortly after it started, because Dara was an investor,” Okerstrom said. “He sat right beside me, and so we would always talk about investments, investment ideas. And so I was super intrigued about what they were doing.”

Convoy has raised $668 million over its lifetime from investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi; former Starbucks president Howard Behar; U2’s Bono and The Edge; among others.

Expedia Group chairman Barry Diller, center, speaks with Dara Khosrowshahi and Mark Okerstrom during a 2016 event. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)

Another Convoy investor is also familiar to Okerstrom: Barry Diller, the Expedia Group chairman, who cited a disagreement over strategy and disappointing financial results for the abrupt departures Okerstrom and CFO Alan Pickerill in December. That was before the pandemic threw the travel market into a tailspin.

After Okerstrom’s departure from Expedia, he was contemplating his next steps when Lewis contacted him.

“Dan just reached out at the right time; I had the background on the business. I hadn’t worked in an earlier stage company before. And yet there were so many interesting parallels between what we had done at Expedia and the opportunity ahead of Convoy. … I just said, ‘I just can’t pass this up. It’s gonna be a blast.’ ”

Okerstrom said he was also drawn by the environmental benefits of creating new efficiencies in shipping.

At some companies, hiring someone with experience as a public company CEO would foreshadow an initial public offering, but Lewis downplayed that notion.

“I don’t think that’s the primary driver here,” Lewis said in response to the IPO question. “If you were to listen in on our leadership team discussions, that’s not the thing that we’re spending our time thinking about right now. It’s how do we build the best business and continue to serve customers in new ways.”

They are spending time on expansion into new lines of business. Lewis pointed to Convoy’s recent launch of a payment service and fuel card for carriers as early examples of the types of programs and initiatives the company looking to roll out. The idea, Lewis said, is to “really think about trucking across multiple modes, but then also start to think about, how do we make the supply chain more efficient in all the places that overlap and interact with trucking.”

Lewis said the company has found in Okerstrom “somebody that can help us think about what that future looks like … across multiple businesses, really expanding to serve our customers.”

The pandemic has been a roller-coaster for Convoy, causing wild volatility in supply chains. The company says it saw demand for trucking surge in March and plunge in April, before rebounding to levels now approaching all-time highs.

The company cut a handful of positions early in the economic downturn, primarily in recruiting, after it reduced its number of open roles for the year. However, Convoy continues to add employees, and it is seeking to fill open roles.

For the record, Okerstrom hasn’t worked in trucking before, but he points out that his wife’s uncles are truck drivers in his native Canada, just in case that does anything to burnish his industry credentials.

If and when Convoy expands there, he said, “I’ll be a family celebrity.”

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Former Microsoft leader and FiftyThree co-founder Georg Petschnigg on TikTok, Surface Duo, more

Georg Petschnigg. (WeTransfer Photo)

Georg Petschnigg learned a lot during an 10-year career at Microsoft, where he worked on various consumer products such as PowerPoint and Microsoft Courier. He also got an inside look at how the tech giant integrated various acquisitions of companies including Visio, Danger, and Nokia.

We caught up with Petschnigg to get his take on Microsoft’s bid for TikTok, its new Surface Duo device, and more. Petschnigg left Microsoft in 2011 to help launch FiftyThree, best known for developing the popular drawing app Paper and presentation tool Paste. File-sharing company WeTransfer acquired Paper and Paste in 2018, expanding the company’s reach into creative tools. Petschnigg is now chief innovation officer at WeTransfer.

What was your initial reaction to Microsoft’s pursuit of TikTok?

My first thought was that a Microsoft acquisition of TikTok makes total sense when you think about Microsoft’s business and history. Microsoft has put significant muscle and resources into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and invested hundreds of millions over the years in building out Microsoft Research. These investments have paid off in many ways, like with Azure Cognitive Services and Cortana, but Microsoft doesn’t have a great AI-based vehicle for entertainment.

The beauty of TikTok is that it combines content distribution to a large audience with technical, media and user interface inventions with ML at the core. These are all areas that Microsoft has experimented with, but hasn’t truly put together in a compelling end-to-end manner for consumers. In this way Tik Tok defines a new paradigm for software which Microsoft wants to be part of.

If Microsoft does indeed acquire part of TikTok’s operations, how do you expect the company to handle it? Will it follow similar acquisitions in the past or be different?

Microsoft has gotten smarter in handling acquisitions over the years, especially when it comes to integrating tools or apps into their broader ecosystem. I saw many acquisitions at Microsoft and incorporated key learnings when Paper and Paste, the creative/productivity apps I developed at FiftyThree, were acquired by WeTransfer in 2018.

A good model here is the acquisition of Accompli which became Outlook for Mobile or Bungie (developers of Halo). The leadership of those teams were empowered to drive cultural change within Microsoft. Accompli helped Microsoft understand mobile development for iOS and Android. Bungie brought in AAA gaming DNA. With TikTok, Microsoft could accelerate the embrace of ML at the core of software development. That said, TikTok would probably remain a standalone app vs. being integrated into the larger Microsoft suite.

(Bigstock Photo)

What are the biggest upsides or opportunities to Microsoft acquiring TikTok? And what about downsides or challenges?

There’s enormous opportunity to interpret content within videos. TikTok has perfected a blend of entertainment and machine learning – every time you watch a video, TikTok interprets your micro-interactions (scrolls, dwells, taps) to determine the next video to show you and keep you entertained.

Microsoft’s entertainment business has primarily focused on gaming and they haven’t developed any entertainment apps for consumers. With TikTok, they acquire a partner to extend consumer reach with a really powerful AI core.

An acquisition also means that Microsoft draws a spotlight to itself around data collection, a conversation that, by and large, they’ve managed to address better than say Google or Facebook, but certainly will draw them into a geo-political fray.

You say TikTok is Cortana for entertainment. What do you mean by that?

Up until now digital assistants like Alexa or Siri just never had a good answer if you would ask them “show me an entertaining video.” Often even the jokes it tells are canned. However, showing you entertaining videos is what TikTok is really good at doing — that’s what made me think TikTok could be Microsoft’s Cortana for entertainment.

It’s not a coincidence that TikTok has surged in popularity; the developers created a really powerful and compelling blend of machine learning that gives people content they want to see, and a simple UX that keeps people in the app. When people use TikTok for the first time, it understands their gender, region, age, and content interests. No other app does this so quickly and easily. TikTok also goes against the grain of most media or social apps that require you to choose categories of interest (Pinterest), rate films (Netflix), or follow people (Facebook) before you get to see content.

Surface Duo. (Microsoft Photo)

You led the incubation for Microsoft Courier. What are your thoughts on the Surface Duo? Do you think Microsoft will be able to establish a new form factor?

I have so many thoughts here, but in short, yes, I think Microsoft will establish the Duo as a new form factor. It will go further than that. It will define Microsoft’s take on mobile productivity and creativity.

The core insight for Courier, and the dual screen design, came from Abigail Sellen’s research in the “Myth of the Paperless Office.” She shared that the fold, two pages side-by-side, are integral to cognitive tasks such as comparing, organizing, sorting – the building blocks of making sense of digital work. Single screen solutions on mobile just do not feel right. The screen is either too small, or in the case of the iPad side-by-side still feels wonky. With Courier we saw the power of the form factor, and the foldable design means you get twice the screen.

Microsoft is very serious about this idea and embraced it. The fact that Microsoft is shipping this device with Android shows that they are putting the user experience first and technology ambitions second. Keep in mind that Ballmer canceled Courier over concerns that it would not fit in the One Windows strategy. Times have really changed.

Lastly I wouldn’t be surprised if Google and Microsoft invest in a new app store based on Android for the Surface Duo. I can see a new ecosystem of applications for productivity and creativity emerging around this form factor.

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Amazon settles lawsuit with former AWS marketing VP who joined Google Cloud

Brian Hall

Amazon has reached a confidential legal settlement with Brian Hall, a former Amazon Web Services vice president of product marketing who was sued by the company after taking a job with Google Cloud in alleged violation of the non-compete clause in his Amazon employment agreement.

Hall changed his title on his LinkedIn profile overnight, signaling that he has been cleared to work as vice president of product and industry marketing at Google Cloud. He had listed his job as Google “VP in Purgatory” while the dispute was pending.

The case was the latest in a series of lawsuits filed by Amazon and others in Washington state to enforce non-compete clauses in employment contracts. The controversial agreements have essentially been banned in California. Washington state last year enacted new provisions meant to limit their applicability, but the law doesn’t apply to employees who earn more than $100,000 a year.

While Amazon and other tech companies treat the provisions as a necessary safeguard, critics say they put the Seattle region’s tech industry at a disadvantage to California.

“Settlement terms are usually secret, so we are left with the question of whether AWS is changing its overly-broad non-compete terms and/or its arbitrary enforcement of non-competes,” said Charles Fitzgerald, a Seattle-area angel investor and veteran tech executive who was a vocal supporter of Hall’s case. “At this point, all the uncertainty raised by the legal action against Brian Hall remains for anyone considering a job at AWS.”

Neither the company nor Hall is commenting on details of the settlement, and the court docket has yet to be updated with a record of the resolution.

In a tweet overnight, Hall thanked those who supported his case.

oh, and also some other things I can now do… THANK YOU to all of the people who have supported me in the last few months. @charlesfitz I think you can retire the #freebrianhall tag now. I won’t say much more… https://t.co/FRrJNg8vc8 https://t.co/CVaQlBJFJ7

— Brian Hall (@IsForAt) July 17, 2020

Hall left his role as vice president of product marketing for Amazon Web Services in March and took a senior product marketing job with Google Cloud in early April.

Amazon then sued Hall, claiming that the new role violated the terms of his non-compete agreement and risked exposing valuable competitive information to one of its biggest rivals. The company was seeking to enforce an 18-month non-compete provision in Hall’s employment contract, asking for an injunction to prevent him from working in cloud product marketing for Google during that period. This suit was unusual in that it involved a marketing leader, not an engineering executive or technical leader as in many other cases.

Celebrate the leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and technologists at the 2020 GeekWire Awards, livestreaming on GeekWire.com starting at 4 p.m. on Thursday, July 23. 

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Amazon vets behind smart shopping cart startup face a familiar foe — their former employer

Shariq Siddiqui (left) and Umer Sadiq, co-founders of Veeve, with their AI-powered smart grocery cart at the GroceryShop conference in Las Vegas in September 2019. See latest version of Veeve shopping cart below. (Veeve Photo)

With combined experience of nearly two decades at Amazon, startup founders Shariq Siddiqui and Umer Sadiq remain big believers in the tech giant’s mantra of obsessing about customers, not competitors. But it was tough to ignore the giant new rival that entered their market this week.

Amazon’s announcement of a new “Dash Cart” makes the tech giant a direct competitor to Veeve, the Seattle-area smart shopping cart startup that Siddiqui and Sadiq launched in 2018 and unveiled last year. And there are many similarities in their approaches. Customers scan a QR code to log in. Sensors and cameras in the cart identify products automatically as they’re placed inside, automatically tallying the bill as they go, eliminating the need for a traditional checkout process.

But this is not a story of Amazon stomping out a smaller company on its march to market dominance. In fact, at least so far, Veeve is benefiting from Amazon’s move.

Veeve had already seen growing interest in its technology based on the demand for contact-less shopping experiences due to social distancing requirements with the pandemic. Retailers in Seattle and Northern California are testing the Veeve cart. And almost immediately after Amazon’s news on Tuesday, the company saw an influx of additional interest, not just from regional and independent grocers but from some of the top retailers in the country.

Startup founders often like to say that the arrival of a big competitor is a rising tide that lifts all boats — and often it’s not true. But Amazon’s move into smart shopping carts does seem to have quickly validated a market that other retailers might have been wary about before.

Amazon’s Dash Cart will debut later this year at the company’s Southern California grocery store. (Amazon Photo)

“Amazon is clearly the trendsetter when it comes to online shopping, but in the last two years, especially with the acquisition of Whole Foods, the launch of Amazon Go stores, along with multiple other brick and mortar projects, every retailer understands that Amazon’s going to come in and disrupt in-store brick-and-mortar experiences,” said Siddiqui, the Veeve CEO.

The company’s growing influence over physical retail is part of the larger trend of “omnichannel” retail, unifying in-store and online shopping experiences.

In many ways, the startup founders knew it was inevitable that Amazon would enter the smart cart market. They didn’t work on Amazon Go during their time at Amazon, but they were among the first to test the technology, which uses overhead cameras and other sensors around the store to track the items picked up and carried out by shoppers.

At the time, it seemed like a natural next step to them to bring the tracking technology into a smart shopping cart, teaming up with former Google computer vision scientist Faisal Shifayat to launch Veeve. It was only logical to assume that Amazon was thinking in much the same way.

Amazon spent years developing the Amazon Go technology, first rolling out convenience stores before taking it to full-scale grocery locations. It might sound easier to build the technology into a cart than into an entire store, but that’s not necessarily the case, said Sadiq, the Veeve CTO and co-founder.

Veeve’s smart shopping cart. (Veeve Photo)

He pointed to a long list of tech companies, dating back to the 1980s, that tried unsuccessfully to launch their own smart grocery shopping carts.

“There were rumors of Amazon trying this,” Sadiq said. “I don’t think it’s an easier problem to solve. Having a mobile checkout station that you put in the hands of a customer, there tend to be a lot of different edge cases that come up. And if you start into that Whac-A-Mole exercise, it can be a pretty long journey.”

Veeve, which raised $2.1 million in a seed funding round in October 2019, currently employs about 15 people.

So how confident are the Veeve co-founders that they can compete with their former employer? They were careful to point out that they haven’t seen the actual Amazon product, but they said there is one aspect of their cart that they are being purposefully secretive about, that they believe will give them an edge.

As a startup, they believe they’re also in a position to be more nimble than a larger competitor.

“We’re already out there. We’re already collecting a lot of customer data, a lot of computer vision training data. And so hopefully that gives us an edge,” Siddiqui said. “But obviously, we’re dealing with Amazon, so you can never underestimate them.”

Celebrate the leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and technologists at the 2020 GeekWire Awards, livestreaming on GeekWire.com starting at 4 p.m. on Thursday, July 23. 

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