Springpad, a startup that helps users organize notes, links, and other content into digital notebooks, is announcing that it has appointed Jacqueline Hampton as its new CEO.
Hampton was most recently vice president of corporate development at Time Inc., where she said she oversaw the the acquisition of Golf.com, Stylefeeder, Mousebreaker, and Groupo Expansión. She also spent seven years as an investment banker. And even though the official announcement of her new role is only coming today, she told me it has been a gradual transition — she’s been working as a consultant with Springpad for the past six months.
Meanwhile, the company’s co-founder and previous CEO Jeff Chow will remain on-board, with a focus on product strategy. It can be tough for new CEOs to come into existing startups, especially when the last CEO is still around, but Hampton said she “didn’t have any trepidation at all.”
“I’ve developed a really strong, complementary relationship with Jeff,” she said. “He has a great skillset on the product side — with what’s going in the world of personal assistant apps, this isn’t a world where we want to rest. I complement him a highly extroverted personality and a focus on getting the brand out there.”
Building up awareness of the Springpad brand was an idea that Hampton emphasized several times during our conversation. She said the company has built a strong product, one that people intuitively understand once she demonstrates it to them, but it needs to get its name out there. She also pitched it as a unique mix between a private productivity app and a broader social search tool.
With her connections to the New York media world (Springpad is headquartered in Boston), Hampton added that she wants to work on bringing more brands onto the platform, where they can engage with consumers by publishing their own notebooks. In fact, Springpad is also announcing new partnerships with Time-owned women’s lifestyle magazine Real Simple and book discovery site Bookish.com
Springpad, which launched a major redesign earlier this year, says it now has 4.5 million registered users.