Tressie Lieberman has been appointed as the new executive vice president and global chief brand officer at Starbucks. She comes from Yahoo, where she served as the chief marketing officer for the past year. Lieberman will be based in Seattle and will report to CEO Brian Niccol, who took over the company’s leadership in August. Niccol and Lieberman previously worked together at Chipotle, where she was the vice president of digital marketing. She has also held leadership positions at Snap Kitchen, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. In her new role at Starbucks, Lieberman will oversee marketing, product, digital, creative, and data analytics and insights to help reposition the company’s brand amid slumping sales.
Niccol’s strategy at Starbucks includes redefining the company’s brand identity, focusing on selling handcrafted, premium coffee to attract customers. He emphasized the importance of telling Starbucks’ story and reintroducing the brand to the world, with Lieberman playing a key role in this repositioning effort. Since Niccol took over, at least three executives have left Starbucks, and the company has announced a reorganization of some of its teams. Sara Trilling, executive vice president and president of Starbucks North America, will have new direct reports to improve accountability for store concepts, design, and development. Starbucks is also combining its Global Communications and Corporate Affairs teams under a single leader, Dominic Carr, who will now oversee both functions.
Francois Vigneault has stepped down as CEO of Seattle biotech startup Shape Therapeutics, with Chief Scientific Officer David Huss taking over as interim CEO. Vigneault expressed his pride in building the startup and his eagerness to return to his passion for early technology development across various industries. Shape Therapeutics, founded in 2018, has developed RNA editing technologies for changing the sequence of RNA to support the development of gene therapies for diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The company signed a deal with Roche in 2021 potentially exceeding $3 billion for this purpose.
Seattle startup Read AI has appointed Kate Reinmiller as vice president of operations and Karin Rodriguez as principal recruiter. Read AI, which uses artificial intelligence to generate meeting summaries and video highlights, is experiencing significant growth. Reinmiller brings experience from previous roles as chief operating officer and co-founder at various startups, while Rodriguez has worked at companies like GoDaddy and Wyze Labs. DevZero, another Seattle startup, has hired Alberto Grande as its new head of marketing. Grande, who previously served as the vice president of marketing at X-Team, will help DevZero, a platform that assists developers in writing code in the cloud, after the company raised $26 million in funding last year.
