News Update

Tech Moves: Madrona adds strategic directors; ex-Amperity CMO joins Tenable; Discord hires Microsoft gaming exec

• ByStartupStory     |    December 18, 2021

Seattle startup vet Brian Goldfarb was named chief marketing officer at Tenable, a Columbia, Md.-based cybersecurity company. He was most recently CMO at Seattle marketing startup Amperity.

Goldfarb was previously CMO and SVP of business development at Chef Software and before that CMO at Splunk. He’s also held roles at Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.

— Elizabeth “Liz” Hamren is now chief operating officer at Discord. She was most recently Microsoft’s CVP of gaming experiences and platforms, overseeing Xbox’s product and engineering teams.

Hamren was previously head of global marketing and sales for Oculus VR and VP of marketing for Dropcam. She recently joined the board of LegalZoom.

In her new role, Hamren will be responsible for Discord’s marketing, business development and operations. She replaces Mak Azadi, who departed in August, according to VentureBeat.

Earlier this year, Discord was reportedly in acquisition talks with Microsoft and others but did not reach a deal.

— Former Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene was confirmed on Thursday by the Senate as the CIO and assistant secretary for information and technology at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He was nominated by President Biden in November

The former Microsoft Office president, whose recent role included leading the company’s pandemic response, retired from the Seattle-area tech giant earlier this year after more than 27 years across two stints.

DelBene left the company in 2013 and spent seven months as senior advisor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, appointed by then-President Obama to address problems with the Healthcare.gov web portal.

He then returned to Microsoft in 2015 to lead corporate strategy and coordinate engineering functions across the company, reporting to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

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