McPherson, whose LinkedIn profile still shows her at Yammer, led marketing at that company for the past three years. Prior to that she was a partner at the Horn Group, a PR firm, and a senior vice president at Ogilvy PR. She also spent three years as a director of public relations at PeopleSoft.

“Dee Anna is a dream fit — she put enterprise social networking on the map at Yammer and will help HootSuite continue to expand its penetration into social enterprises,” HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes said in a statement.

Among her accomplishments at Yammer were the acquisition of the company by Microsoft for $1.2 billion and a healthy 300 percent annual growth rate.

HootSuite, which recently became one of only a handful of Twitter Ad API partners, took some steps closer to inside-the-company Yammer territory last year with its Conversations feature. This hire, however, is almost certainly not about HootSuite becoming more Yammer-like but about HootSuite continuing its growth inside large enterprises. Seventy-nine of the Fortune 100 already use HootSuite, but there’s a lot of room to grow deeper and broader.

Source: LinkedIn

Dee Anna McPherson

“I’m thrilled to join HootSuite during a period of such incredible growth,” said McPherson in a rather predictable PR-speak quote. “There’s no position I’d rather be in than heading up a talented team working to cement an innovative product at the head of the pack for enterprise social media management.”

One question: Where will she work?

McPherson is San Francisco-based, while HootSuite is Vancouver-based. HootSuite does have a San Francisco office but has indicated in the past that it has no intention of moving senior staff. That said, all of its top people spend time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley regularly, and it would not be unusual for McPherson to simply reverse that trend, working in San Francisco while occasionally visiting Vancouver.

One quick tip for the long-time PR pro: How about a LinkedIn photo sans redeye?

HootSuite continues to grow both users and headcount, with over six million users and now 250 employees, up from just 70 at the start of last year.

photo credit: Blue Genie Art via photopin cc

Former Cisco executive Tim Danford has joined Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm.

Danford is focusing on building the firm’s incubation program for exceptionally early-stage startups and exploring new opportunities in the mobile and enterprise security space.

“I am working to identify very fundamental problems in the enterprise,” he said by phone. Danford is particularly curious about how chief executives will respond to the growing trend for employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) to work. At first, they will adopt new technologies that would enable BYOD, which may result in a drop in productivity.

“At some point in the not too distant future, CEOs will turn around and question whether these BYOD platforms are bringing any real ROI to their business,” he explained. For this reason, Danford will invest in startups that would enable cloud-based collaboration and boost employee productivity.

Prior to joining Lightspeed, Danford was the managing director at Storm Ventures, where he served a board adviser (and cowrote the patent) for hot mobile device management company MobileIron.

In the late 1990s, he led mergers and acquisitions at Cisco. In 2001, Danford was bit by the entrepreneurial bug and formed an idea for wireless networking hardware, which was considered a “dumb idea.” He ultimately left Cisco to form a company, later called Airespace, which his former employer bought for $450 million.

Six months after the departure of cofounder John Simon, General Catalyst Partners has scooped up Adam Valkin from Accel Partners, where he has worked since April 2010.

Valkin will dedicate his time to sourcing early-stage investment opportunities, and will work with the firm’s existing portfolio companies, which include HubSpot, Airbnb, GoodData and Taleo. Valkin, who previously worked out of Accel’s London office, is relocating to Boston to assume his new role.

In an interview, he said the primary driver was personal as his family lives in Boston. “This was a friendly move,” he said, adding that General Catalyst was a “natural choice” as the firms have often worked together in the past.

At Accel, Valkin focused broadly on Internet and mobile services, gaming and payments. With roots in London, Valkin had a front row seat to some of the most promising Israeli startups — he made investments in MyHeritage and mobile gaming startup DragonPlay. His investment portfolio also includes Spotify, SeekingAlpha, and $5 tasks marketplace Fiverr.

Prior to joining Accel, Valkin worked as the Global Head of Digital Media and New Business at Endemol, the European television production company. He was also a co-founder, investor and briefly interim CEO of LOVEFiLM, which sold to Amazon.com in 2011. Previously, he worked for Barnes & Noble and Firefly Network, later acquired by Microsoft.

General Catalyst is a long-time partner with Accel; the firms have frequently joined up in funding hot startups like Brightcove over the years. General Catalyst has been slowly creeping into the media spotlight with recent investments in buzzy startups, such as CouchSurfing and TuneIn. It has proven to be one of the most progressive of the traditional firms with its interest in data-driven investing.

Top image credit: LeWeb / Flickr

After venturing into heavy financial territory with its recent $100 million Series A of funding, GitHub has taken on some top-shelf help: Vlado Herman, who was formerly the chief finance officer at Yelp.

Herman is GitHub’s first-ever chief finance executive, it confirmed to VentureBeat via email.

Before July, GitHub had been running its business on sales alone; its service involves code repositories and collaboration, and its enterprise sales were enough to keep the ship afloat and the staff expanding. However, just a few months ago, the famously bootstrapped startup decided to take a massive first round of institutional funding from Andreessen Horowitz. At $100 million for the round, that came to more than $1 million per employee.

So to help manage the new money (and the money coming in from all those big, beautiful sales), GitHub’s taken on a new C-suite hire. Herman was Yelp’s CFO for five critical years that saw the company blossom from a scrappy startup to a web giant. Before that, he had stints at Yahoo and Ernst & Young.

“From the very first time I shook his hand, I knew I wanted to work with Vlado,” wrote GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner today on its  blog. “He’s sharp, funny, patient, and believes in optimizing for happiness. Finding a proven financial expert that fit our culture wasn’t easy, but we were very lucky to find someone special, and now we’re incredibly proud to call Vlado a GitHubber.”

As for the money Herman’s been hired to manage, Preston-Werner told us in a previous chat that the cash was intended to help his startup take over the enterprise, roll out new features and products for nondeveloper personnel such as technical writers and web designers, and build bug-free clients for all platforms and devices.

“Specifically, there’s a strategy called ‘GitHub Everywhere.’ We want everyone in software to be using GitHub,” said Preston-Werner, “individuals by themselves, small teams, students, as well as big, massive enterprises. … Where we are now and what’s left for us to accomplish, having some money in the bank is going to … make GitHub better for everyone involved.”

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Today, I found myself privy to the first meeting between Box’s CEO, Aaron Levie, and his new vice president of engineering, Sam Schillace.

The pair have known each other for years and both saw early potential in cloud computing technology, but Schillace is no easy target for any startup. Until this week, he was the entrepreneur-in-residence and Principal at Google Ventures. “It has been a seven-and-a-half year recruiting project,” Levie half-joked.

Sam Schillace, Box’s new VP of engineering

This announcement follows a spate of recent announcements for Box, a Silicon Valley-based cloud storage startup. In the past month, the company pulled in $125 million in funding, and opened its first international office in London. This week, the company also brought on Evan Wittenberg as its new VP of People (startup speak for vice president of Human Resources).

It will be an intriguing partnership. Levie told me he first reached out to Schillace in 2005 to discuss a potential integration with Box (then “Box.net”). It didn’t work out, as Schillace was already in acquisition talks with Google. Schillace’s startup, Writely, was the first co-editing service, and provided the foundation for Google Docs.

“It has been a decade-long progress moving from desktop to cloud,” Schillace told me, when asked about his reasons for joining Box now, given that he has been a technical advisor to the company for the past two years. “We are just seeing the knee of the curve.” He said he would dedicate his energies to improving collaboration within Box’s core product.

Schillace will continue to serve as an advisor for Google Ventures and its portfolio companies.

Merholz will now work for Inflection, a big-data startup with an office a stone’s throw from the Oracle campus in Redwood City, California.

“Peter built Adaptive Path for 10-plus years and has decided to take on an operating role where he can influence UX inside a company, rather than from a consulting angle,” an Inflection spokesperson wrote to VentureBeat in an email.

Merholz, who founded Adaptive Path in 2001, will lead Inflection’s user experience team as the company’s new VP of UX.

“I see my real job as encouraging a company-wide mindset around holistic customer experience, built on a foundation of deep empathy for our users,” Merholz stated in a release.

“That empathy will guide us in the ongoing expansion of Inflection’s portfolio, ensuring the delivery of outstanding products and services that meet very real customer needs.”

Inflection’s porfolio includes around 8 billion public records; the startup’s goal is to make finding public documents simple and affordable for normal users. Right now, the company aggregates data from sources such as the U.S. census, courts, yearbooks, phone books, business filings and other public records. The company owns and operates Archives.com and PeopleSmart.com.

A company rep said Merholz’s experience and acumen will be especially valuable in a few specific projects. According to this spokesperson, Archives.com is “now in a position to innovate the core user experience for someone who wants to build their family tree and discover their family history. Peter’s experience will help us get there.”

New product launches over the next two quarters, as well as recruiting and training a best-in-class UX and design team, will round out Merholz’s duties in his new job.

Inflection was founded in 2006 by brothers Brian and Matthew Monahan, who hacked the company together from the cozy confines of their Harvard dorm room. The company took its first funding in 2010 and currently has around 135 employees in two offices, one in Redwood City and the other in Omaha, Nebraska (ah, we love Omaha — no sarcasm).

So what about Adaptive Path? With two studios (one in San Francisco and another in Austin, Texas) and a client roster that includes Samsung, USAA, and The Harvard Business Review, the shop is likely in good shape and shows no signs of slowing down. Merholz will remain as an advisor, as have many of his co-founders.

Christopher Dean, formerly Skype’s chief strategy officer and the company’s global business development head, will now be Urban Airship’s chief revenue officer.

At Portland-based Urban Airship, Dean will head up sales and business development efforts for the still-young startup. Dean will work out of the mobile services company’s San Francisco office.

“To be a truly great startup there has to be a combination of first-timers hell bent on changing the world, and been-there-done-that execs who know how to focus teams and leverage the best opportunities,” said Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton in a statement.

“We get a little bit of both with Chris, and he will be a phenomenal addition to the leadership team.”

Dean began working at Skype in 2008. Prior to that, he help biz dev positions at tech companies such as FaceTime Communications (now Actiance, geospatial data company Analytical Surveys, tech investment firm Epoch Partners, and SmartAge, a dotcom consultancy that was acquired in or around 2000.

Late in 2011, Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo, a San Francisco-based startup focusing on providing data to mobile developers. Since that’s very much Urban Airship’s home turf, the acquisition made a lot of sense.

“Urban Airship has the opportunity to take the leadership position in a new and important category of products critical to companies that are now interacting with customers on mobile devices,” said Dean in a statement.

“The team is a blend of the very best technical, marketing and creative talent I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m excited to be part of it.”

Urban Airship provides tools for mobile developers to make money and engage users will their apps. Clients include Warner Bros., Groupon, Yahoo any many others. The startup says it is responsible for more than 250 million app installs.

UA was founded in 2009 and has taken $21.6 million in funding to date, around $15 million of which came from last year’s round from Salesforce and Verizon. The company reported that it saw a 600 percent year-over-year revenue growth in October 2011.

After the tumultuous reign of Carol Bartz, a firebrand whose foul mouth was the delight of onlookers and the bane of her own company, Yahoo has settled on an entirely different type of leader.

Scott Thompson, 53, is a nerd, pure and simple. His managerial track record shows a certain personal risk-aversion; he’s an accountant and IT guy at heart. And over the past four months, as a watching world speculated on who might head up Yahoo next, he was at the top of exactly nobody’s shortlist.

Thompson has built a stable career for himself at the intersection of consumer-facing finance and technology architecture and infrastructure. For the most part, he has stayed far from the mainstream limelight, eschewing media attention while quietly raking in the chips. (In 2010, for example, Thompson took home in excess of $10 million as the president of Paypal.)

While Thompson did receive the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2011 (for the financial services category in northern California), he himself has never been an entrepreneur. Rather, he got to the top the hard way: a long, slow slog that involved long managerial and executive tenures at slow-moving finance companies.

Stonehill College is a private, Catholic institution in Easton, Massachusetts, not too far from Boston. It’s a rather small school, and it’s where Thompson’s career started. He studied accounting and computer science, earning a bachelor’s degree in both disciplines and setting the stage for the rest of his career — up until today, that is.

Over the past couple decades, Thompson has completed stints at major finance firms where he worked on information technology tasks. He worked at Coopers & Lybrand (which later merged with Price Waterhouse to become the professional services and accountancy megalith PricewaterhouseCoopers), where he worked on products for clients such as Wells Fargo.

Thompson was far from Silicon Valley during the dotcom era, working from 1998 to 2001 for Visa as the company’s chief technical officer and executive vice president of technology and support services. After that, he continued as Visa subsidiary Inovant’s executive vice president of technology solutions, working on electronic payment processing services until 2005, when Paypal came a-courtin’.

Thompson started out at Paypal as senior vice president and chief technology officer in Feburary 2005. (The company had been acquired by eBay some three years before Thompson came through the door.) He became the company’s president in January 2008.

The eBay/Paypal corporate culture had by then evolved into something quite unlike the Silicon Valley culture that prizes creativity, disruption and the kind of violent upheaval that leads to innovation. Rather, the many-headed entity had become a sort of executive farm team yielding high-level leaders with political prowess, a polished image for PR purposes and the patience needed to run companies the size of small countries.

For example, the company turned out Rajiv Dutta, who sat in the president’s office just before Thompson. Dutta went on to become managing director at private equity firm Elevation Partners, a board member for Palm, and distinguished executive-in-residence at the Drucker Institute and the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management.

And then there’s Bill Cobb, who served eight years at eBay as the company’s president of the U.S. marketplaces division and, prior to that, held a handful of higher management and executive positions at the company. In May 2011, Cobb took over at H&R Block as that firm’s president and CEO.

But the most prominent graduate of the eBay school of management is undoubtedly Meg Whitman, who served as eBay’s president and CEO from 1998 to 2008 and won the Republican primary in the California gubernatorial race two years later. The election didn’t pan out in her favor, but she became CEO at Hewlett-Packard in mid 2011.

In a word, during the past few years, eBay and Paypal have become something of a breeding ground for stable and trustworthy leaders with the capacity to handle complex financial and business situations, up to and including the running of a rather large state. If Thompson has anything in common with other executives at the company he just left, he’s no Carol Bartz — and we’re sure Yahoo’s board appreciates that fact.

Still, did those decades of IT and consumer finance work prepare Thompson for leadership of a company focused on content and advertising? What makes him the best choice for Yahoo now, when the latter company is decidedly troubled and is already relinquishing many of its assets to shore itself up for a rocky road ahead?

Paypal was Thompson’s passion, and leading it was the zenith of his career. Everything from his bachelor’s degree onward prepared him to take the helm at that company. He told eBay chief John Donahoe just yesterday afternoon that he was leaving that position behind effective immediately — and in looking over Thompson’s career, it might just be the first truly shocking moment of his professional life.

In a conference call this morning, Thompson admitted he has “a lot to learn” about Yahoo and its business model, not to mention its recent history and immediate future.

“But,” he continued, “my instinct says that down in that data we will find ways to compete and innovate that the world hasn’t seen yet.”

Hopefully, his Paypal leadership stint also prepared him for the political battles that await him as Yahoo continues to dodge unsolicited acquisition offers and media rumors of private-equity takeovers.