Yahoo lost a key thought leader when vice president and chief cloud systems architect, Todd Papaioannou, announced his departure from the company to take a new job as entrepreneur in residence at venture capital firm Battery Ventures, GigaOm reported Aug. 5.
Battery Ventures, which has offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., in Waltham, Mass., and in Herzliya, Israel, has raised more than $4 billion in funds since its inception in 1983. The company has backed such enterprises as Akamai Technologies, Allegiance Telecom, FORE Systems, HNC Software, Infoseek, MetroPCS, Nextel, Pixelworks, Qtera, SigmaTel, Vastera and Witness Systems.
Papaioannou (pictured) will work with Battery’s investment team “to help them identify disruptive technologies for the next three to five years … help existing Battery portfolio companies build the best scalable enterprise software … and develop new ideas for investment,” he told GigaOm’s Derrick Harris.
For a little more than one year at Yahoo, Papaioannou headed up strategic direction for Yahoo’s cloud computing and Hadoop teams, helping to define the company’s overall IT strategy.
Papaioannou has a big-data-oriented storage background. Prior to joining Yahoo, he spent nearly five years in several software architecture jobs at data warehouser Teradata. Previously, he was an early employee at startup Greenplum, serving as the chief architect and director of engineering.
Storage and security systems maker EMC acquired Greenplum in 2010 to provide its chief big data analytics system.
Papaioannou told GigaOm that he “left Yahoo to pursue my personal predilections. My background has been in consumer and enterprise software, but Yahoo was my first gig in internal IT. It was a great experience, but I wanted to get back into shipping software and competing in the market against other products.”