UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect that Michael Thomas will remain in the CTO slot at Blink.
As Etsy talent starts leaving the nest in the wake of the company’s initial public offering last year, they’re starting to land at new startups in the New York area.
The latest Etsy exec to migrate to a privately held startup is former Etsy chief technology officer Kellan Elliott-McCrea, who’s heading over to Blink Health, a company that’s using technology to create a marketplace for cheap prescription medications.
Beyond being a welcome sign of the maturing technology ecosystem in New York, it’s a great way to gauge which companies could be the next new thing in the New York firmament.
Elliott-McCrea will work with Michael Thomas, who has been the CTO at Blink since the company’s launch.
Elliott-McCrea is going to lead the engineering team over at Blink Health, serving as the company’s senior vice president at the head of its engineering team.
Co-founded by investment wunderkinds Matthew and Geoffrey Chaiken, Blink Health is most similar to a Groupon for healthcare. The company, which provides deep discounts on prescription pharmaceuticals is backed by BoxGroup and 8VC.
Fixing prescription medicine by lowering the cost is definitely a compelling thesis for a business and Blink isn’t alone in its pursuit of its spot on this corner of the healthcare industry. Other companies like GoodRx and Sempre Health.
In a canned statement, Elliott-McCrea talked about how a sense of mission can make it easier for developers to buckle down and dig in to the hard work of developing products. “From my very first conversation with Blink, it was clear that the mission to make access to health care — starting with affordable prescription drugs — more transparent and equitable is the force that drives engineering and innovation at the company,” Elliott-McCrea said in a statement.
Before joining Etsy, Elliott-McCrea was part of the early team at Flickr and is the co-author of several standards — including OAuth. He founded his first company in 1998, MetaMind, which was eventually sold to Palm.