Comings and Goings

Mar 08 1999

Now that Amazon.com has stepped up its role in a range of e-commerce categories with the revelation of a 40 percent stake in Drugstore.com, it needs to start acting like bigger companies do and get serious about government policy. The word on the street is that Rick White, the former Washington-state congressman, is being wooed by the Seattle-based online retailer, in hopes that he will join its staff. If you're going to take over the world, you need all the help you can get.

Amazon.com is also rumored to be hiring general managers to handle each area of e-commerce: books, music, videos and gifts. Think of them as department managers in the world's biggest mall.

Chris Tragos, son of Bill Tragos, who's the "T" in ad agency TBWA Chiat/Day, has a new gig: VP of marketing and business development at Paramount Digital Entertainment in Los Angeles. Most recently, Tragos headed up Web design shop Troon in Santa Monica, Calif., which did some work for Absolut Vodka, then lost that assignment last year to Red Sky Interactive in San Francisco.

Women's site iVillage in New York, plans to go public soon. It has been criticized for its high staff turnover, and a recent lawsuit against the company for breach of employment contract threatened its plans for an IPO. One recruiter cheerfully points out: "It just makes for a good place to transition from old media into new media." Yes, and war builds character.

Some of those who left iVillage followed Robert Levitan, an iVillage founder with poster girls Candice Carpenter and Nancy Evans, to Flooz, a digital gift-certificate company he's starting with former real-estate exec and college chum ) Spencer Waxman. Dermot McCormack, Flooz's CTO, actually resigned as director of technology for sponsored content - Levitan's group - before Levitan left, but hey, that's what friends are for.

The next hot e-commerce category: online mortgages. E-Loan in Palo Alto, Calif., has managed to snag Joseph Kennedy, a big-time player who was most recently VP of sales, service and marketing at Saturn Corp. of America in Troy, Mich.

Here's another super-quick recruiting job by Stratford Group Venture Practice in San Francisco: Nine days to find a new VP of product management for Santa Clara, Calif.-based AutoWeb, which filed to go public on Jan. 25. Cathy Gordon from Denver-based Datafusion has the job. Meanwhile, Ramsey Beirne's searching for a chief marketing officer for the company.

Also noteworthy: Yipinet in Los Angeles named Lisa Morita VP of marketing and Brian Feldman director of business development. Morita had been VP of advertising and marketing for the Los Angeles Times and Feldman was a director at Concordia Capital in San Francisco. ... Arnel de Jesus is the new VP of consumer marketing and Tom Turcotte is the new director of global information technology at Chumbo.com in Minneapolis. De Jesus was previously senior merchant at Best Buy Online. Turcotte was VP of international information systems at K-Tel.