As you’ve probably noticed, the last couple of announcements have been not about open positions, but about some of the successful hires that we here at PSP have been delighted to be part of.
We’ve told you about Susan Livingston’s hire as VP of Marketing at PCC, and Angelique Rothermel’s for the same role at Pushpay. Now, to round out the trifecta here’s another great pick for the top marketing role at a leading local company: Union.ai has tapped Martin Stein, formerly at RStudio, as its new Chief Marketing Officer.
In our announcement for this position, we laid out what a plum gig this is: Union.ai, based in Bellevue, is essentially an all-star team of engineers from the most successful tech companies in the world, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. They’re using a spinoff of Lyft’s workflow-automation platform, Flyte, to manage the data and machine-learning pipelines that apps are increasingly using for such high-capacity needs as song sharing and vaccine research.
In short, it’s an amazing business model with colossal upside (and, BTW, some serious backing from the VC community). All they needed was to bring in some high-quality marketing muscle – and with Martin Stein, that’s exactly what they now have. Originally from Germany, Martin was a deputy editor in chief for MacWorld Germany before taking a marketing position for Apple in Munich.
Since then, he’s been a marketing mainstay for innovative companies up and down the West Coast – most recently serving as Seattle-based RStudio’s Chief Product Officer and Head of Data Science Center of Excellence and Solution Engineering. Before that, he was General Manager and Chief Marketing Officer at another Seattle tech firm, Defined.ai, where he handled the brand transition from its former identity as DefinedCrowd.
So, to both Martin and his new team at Union.ai, we say “gut gemacht.” (That means “well done” in German; yes, we had to look it up.)
PS From PSP: Interesting to see this item about the high levels of hiring right now, here in the state of Washington, with that scrappy newbie startup Boeing (!) among those leading the charge. The article gets at something I’ve been noticing: It’s gotten so hard to make general statements about anything anymore in the national economy.
Is hiring up, or is it down? Is the economy overheating, or are we on the brink of recession? Is everyone trying to buy a house, or are would-be buyers staying away in droves?
I don’t know what it is, but it increasingly seems like answers to these formerly straightforward questions are all over the place right now, and depend hugely on specific circumstances of geography and industry. If things are indeed this complex and opaque, why might that be – and what does it mean for companies trying to make decisions about hiring and other matters? Readers, what say you?
