Plaxo President and CEO Ben Golub is leaving the company he’s led for the last five years, we’ve confirmed. Golub will be replaced by Justin Miller, who has been Plaxo’s General Manager for the last few months. As part of the transition, long-time Plaxo employee Ryan King will become Chief Operating Officer. Golub hasn’t yet shared his plans for the future, but we’ll have more information on those and other recent developments at Plaxo in the next few weeks.
A lot has happened at Plaxo in the five years since Golub joined. The company, which builds software to help consolidate all of your contact information into a single address book (among other things), was acquired by Comcast in May 2008 for between $150 and $170 million. In the years before the acquisition, Plaxo had to deal with criticisms for making it overly easy to accidentally spam your friends with your contact information, and later got into hot water with some of its screen scraping techniques. But the service has cleaned up its act, and continues to work at making managing your contacts less of a hassle (a problem that is only getting worse with the popularity of social networks, not better).
This isn’t the only recent personnel change at Plaxo — last December, Plaxo CTO Joseph Smarr left to join Google.
Before joining Plaxo in early 2005, Golub served as SVP of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for VeriSign.
“Ben Golub is the President and Chief Executive Officer for Plaxo. Prior to joining Plaxo, he was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for VeriSign, Inc. In his eight years at VeriSign, he also served as Senior Vice President of the security and payments business and General Manager of VeriSign’s managed security services business. In these roles, Ben managed worldwide sales, marketing, product development, support, operations, and business development activities. Prior to VeriSign, Ben held a number...
Justin Miller is the President and CEO of Plaxo. Justin had previously been serving as the General Manager of Plaxo.com. Justin is a business and product leader with unwavering focus on great user experience. He joined Plaxo from Move, where he was the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Design and led the complete redesign of the Realtor.com and Move.com websites. Before Move, he was at eBay, where he led their European Product organization, and before that, led eBay’s global User Experience Design...
Plaxo helps keep people connected by solving the common and frustrating problem of out-of-date contact information. Users and their contacts store their information on Plaxo’s servers. When a user edits their own information, the changes appear in the address books of all those who listed the user in their own address books. Because contacts are stored in a central location, it’s possible to list connections between contacts and access the address book from anywhere. Napster co-founder, Sean Parker, was one...
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