TMCnet News

Kahuna Deepens its Leadership Bench for Market Expansion
[August 05, 2015]

Kahuna Deepens its Leadership Bench for Market Expansion


Kahuna, the leader in marketing automation in the mobile era, today announced that it has recruited an executive leadership team with unparalleled experience in their fields to drive innovation, company growth, and customer satisfaction. Building on an already stellar team with broad industry depth, the new executive bench positions Kahuna for rapid market expansion in one of the most promising sectors in the marketing technology ecosystem.

The new executive hires join Adam Marchick, CEO and Co-Founder, Jacob Taylor, CTO and Co-founder, Fayyaz Younas, Vice President of Engineering, and Julie Ginches, Chief Marketing Officer, who together have been laying the foundation for the company's continuing growth and market disruption.

"Strong leadership is critical to driving innovation and growth in our market," said Marchick. "Each member of our executive team is a CEO in his or her own right and could be just that at another top company. Instead, we are banding together to build something bigger - a company poised to challenge the status quo in the marketing tech ecosystem."

Among Kahuna's most recent senior hires are:

Ron Ablaza, Head of Finance. Ablaza leads financial operations for Kahuna, managing and mapping its tremendous growth. He is a tenured alumni of Cisco, where he was a founding employee of Cisco Capital. He started his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers (News - Alert), and previously - as Head of Finance at Scripted.com - he was instrumental in securing the company's series B round.

Lorie Boyd, Vice President of People. Boyd leads Kahuna's human resource and talent teams and plansto hire 200+ employees within the next year. Prior to Kahuna, she led global recruiting for Zendesk, growing the company to nearly 900 employees across eight offices worldwide. She previously held senior roles at Salesforce.com, Oracle (News - Alert), and PricewaterhouseCoopers.



Matt Cameron, Vice President of Sales. Cameron is building a world-class global sales team for his third time. Previously, he ran global corporate sales for Yammer (News - Alert) and was the head of enterprise sales for Salesforce.com Australia/New Zealand. Recently, he served as VP of Sales at Scripted.com, where his team tripled revenue in 12 months.

David Verhaag, Vice President of Customer Success. Verhaag is focused on building a world-class customer success team to help drive better business outcomes. Verhaag previously served as VP of Customer Success at HireVue where he drove more than 200 percent adoption growth two years in a row. Prior to HireVue, he spent eight years with SuccessFactors in a variety of leaderships roles and helped define and build the global customer value team.


"Kahuna has the vision, the technology, and - equally as important - the leadership team to shake up the marketing technology sector," said Omar Hamoui, partner at Sequoia Capital (News - Alert) and board member at Kahuna. "In the end, Kahuna is in the people business - enabling companies to personally communicate with their customers at scale - and this carefully selected 'A' team will make it all happen."

To learn more about Kahuna's executive leadership team, please visit: https://www.kahuna.com/about/leadership/.

About Kahuna

Kahuna is a mobile marketing automation company dedicated to fostering user delight and driving engagement and revenue through mobile. Kahuna helps companies understand and intelligently communicate with customers wherever they are: email, mobile web, apps, and social networks. We believe there is magic in delivering the right message to the right customer at just the right time.

Kahuna is trusted by Yelp, The Hearst Corporation (News - Alert), Overstock.com, The Weather Channel, and hundreds of other leading brands. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in New York, Kahuna was founded in 2012 and is funded by Sequoia Capital and SoftTech VC.


[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]