Twitch’s senior leadership team is getting reshuffled.
After two years, Kate Jhaveri is leaving as chief marketing officer of the Amazon-owned video game live-streaming service. Jhaveri, who previously held marketing positions at Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft prior to joining Twitch in 2017, is leaving in August to become the CMO of the NBA.
At the same time, Twitch has made two senior hires: Dan Clancy, a former longtime Google exec, as executive VP of creator and community experience, and Lenke Taylor, most recently head of HR at BuzzFeed, as chief people officer.
Clancy is tasked with leading all of Twitch’s consumer product operations except monetization (headed by VP of commerce Matt McCloskey). Clancy reports to CEO Emmett Shear, who had been acting as head of product for the past year. Twitch in January 2018 announced Mark Weiler, a former Microsoft and Rubicon Project exec, as SVP, head of platforms and services. Weiler exited the company only a few months later to become VP engineering at deep-linking startup Branch Metrics, per Crunchbase.
Related
Taylor reports to Twitch chief operating officer Sara Clemens, a veteran of Pandora, LinkedIn and Microsoft who joined the streamer in January 2018. Twitch’s previous head of HR, Sudarshana Rangachary, left in March after about seven months in the job to join Essex Property Trust as chief human resources officer.
“Twitch is growing rapidly and these roles are critical in helping scale both our product and team,” a company rep said in a statement.
Twitch said it will seek a CMO to replace Jhaveri. “Kate has been a hugely valuable member of Twitch’s leadership team,” the rep said. “We’re grateful for all her contributions and wish her the best in her future endeavors.”
Clancy most recently was VP of product and engineering for Nextdoor, a social-networking service for neighborhood communities. Prior to joining Nextdoor in 2014, he spent nearly 10 years in leadership roles at Google across engineering, product and research and served as NASA’s head of information sciences and technology. He graduated from Duke University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and theater and earned a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Texas at Austin.
Taylor spent about three and half years at BuzzFeed, and prior to that was a regional head of people operations for Google based in London. She previously worked as head of HR at NBCUniversal Asia-Pacific based in Singapore and held other HR leadership positions at both NBCU and GE. She graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and earned an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.
Pictured above (l. to r.): Kate Jhaveri, Dan Clancy, Lenke Taylor