One of Yahoo’s key chief technologists, Sam Pullara, is leaving the company to become an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital. Pullara was the technologist who headed up the development of the the Yahoo! Open Application Platform, the Yahoo! Query Language and Yahoo! Pipes. His departure follows that of veteran Yahoo senior executive Ash Patel earlier this week.
Back in 2008, Yahoo was making a big push to open itself up to developers, and Pullara was one of the champions of that strategy. He was also Yahoo’s representative on the OpenSocial Foundation, which sought to create a counterweight to Facebook.
Pullara has been an EIR before. In 2004, he held that position at Accel Partners and created a startup called Gauntlet Systems, which he sold to Borland in 2006. At Benchmark, he will be looking for new startup opportunities. He will also be working again with Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, who was at Accel when Pullara was there. Pullara’s last day at Yahoo will be on April 1. Yahoo has no plans to hire a replacement.
Today, another Benchmark EIR, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, was named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.
Sam is joining Sutter Hill Ventures from Twitter where he was a senior infrastructure engineer and remains a technology advisor. He came to Twitter via the acquisition of Bagcheck in 2011 where he was co-founder and CEO. Previously Sam was an EIR at Benchmark, an angel investor, and the former Chief Technologist at Yahoo!. While at Yahoo! Sam was responsible for technology strategy across the audience organization and platform team. Prior to his role as Chief Technologist, ...
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