Sean Percival, who was most recently co-founder and CEO of children's clothing subscription startup Wittlebee, has joined online discussion site Topix as vice president of marketing.
Percival left Wittlebee earlier this year due to fundraising trouble, and he said he's taking a role at Topix that has been "vacant for a bit." His résumé includes a stint as vice president of online marketing at Myspace (back in the good old days where they still capitalized the "S"), and director of content/content manager at Tsavo Media, docstoc, and Mahalo.
I first became familiar with Percival as the founder of LA startup gossip site Lalawag, so I was surprised to hear that he's moved up to the San Francisco Bay Area to take the job at Topix.
"It was tough to leave LA, but the possibilities up here were just too hard to ignore any longer," he told me via email. As for why he's joining Topix in particular, Percival said he wanted to get back "into content and growth related product development," adding, "Topix is the perfect match for that with its large foundation of millions of existing users and exciting opportunities for developing new verticals."
Topix said earlier this year that it saw 40 percent traffic growth between December 2011 and December 2012 (thanks in part, one assumes to the launch of its politics-focused subsection Politix), and it says it continues to be profitable. (Topix is also a site where the discussion can turn pretty nasty, so whenever I write about it there's always someone popping up to talk about how much they hate it.)
In addition to announcing Percival's hire, Topix also says senior director of sales Laurie Hironaka has been promoted to vice president of sales. In the press release, CEO Chris Tolles said, "We now have the product, marketing and sales teams in place to complement our top tier engineering organization and drive growth in the next part of our story."
Topix is a news community that connects people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city. The site links news from 74,000 sources to more than 450,000 user-generated forums. Topix also works with some of the nation's major media companies to grow and engage their online audiences through forums and RSS feeds.
Sean Percival is an internet entrepreneur based in the Silicon Valley. He launched his first internet startup in 2006 for a mere $12, then sold it in 2009 at an 835,000% return on investment. His second internet company (the popular media site lalawag), which he founded with his wife Laurie, was created in 2008 and sold in 2010. He's also been a recognized, leading authority in digital business, media, entertainment, online marketing, and e-commerce, working with high-profile startups and...
Laurie Hironaka is our Senior Director of Sales at Topix.com. In her 6 years with Topix, she has built the sales team up from two regional offices to a national team. Laurie has helped position Topix as a viable vehicle for blue chip advertising campaigns. Laurie came to Topix from The Economist, where she opened the San Francisco office and built the technology territory to the highest revenue- producing category for The Economist in the world.
Chris Tolles is the CEO and co-founder of Topix. Prior to Topix, Chris co-founded and was the VP of Marketing at Spoke Software, an enterprise social networking startup. Chris was one of the co-founders of NewHoo, which evolved into the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org afgter being acquired by Netscape. The Open Directory is the largest human edited directory of sites on the web. After getting acquired by Netscape, Chris ran marketing for Netscape Search and AOL...
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