Quibi’s spectacular crash this year left the short-lived short-form video company’s employees looking for work.
At least one of Quibi’s top executives has moved on: Ambereen Toubassy, who had been chief financial officer at the Jeffrey Katzenberg-founded startup, is joining enterprise-software firm Airtable as CFO in January 2021.
Quibi had been among the customers for Airtable along with other entertainment companies — including Netflix, Hulu, HBO and A+E Networks — as well as many Fortune 500 corporations. Airtable’s system lets businesses create collaboration software without having to know how to code to manage such processes as creative development, post-production pipelines, and marketing across a distributed organization, according to the company.
Toubassy, commenting on her new job, credited Airtable with helping Quibi ramp up its operations as quickly as it did.
“At Quibi, we simply could not have created 100-plus premium shows and a beautiful and scalable mobile app in 18 months had it not been for the creation, tracking and collaboration made possible by Airtable,” Toubassy said in a statement. “Finding the right product-market fit is incredibly difficult, yet this is something Airtable has accomplished without the shadow of a doubt. I cannot wait to contribute to Airtable’s continued success and incredible future growth.”
Prior to Quibi, Toubassy was partner and CFO of WndrCo, Katzenberg’s media and technology investment firm, which launched in 2017. Before that she spent the majority of her career as a partner and portfolio manager at hedge funds in Los Angeles including JMB Capital, Ivory Capital Management and Empyrean Capital Partners.
San Francisco-based Airtable also announced two other key hires:
- Peter Deng, joining as chief product officer, who previously was the first product director at both Facebook’s Instagram and Oculus VR division. He most recently served as head of rider products at Uber.
- Seth Shaw, joining as chief revenue officer, was most recently chief sales officer at Invision, a digital design product platform used by companies including Netflix, Amazon, HBO. Prior to Invision, he was CRO at Wrike, a software-as-a-service work management platform.
Earlier this year, Archana Agrawal joined Airtable as chief marketing officer after most recently serving as global head of enterprise and cloud marketing at Atlassian.
Airtable is led by co-founder and CEO Howie Liu, who was previously a product leader at Salesforce (which in 2010 acquired his email-contact manager startup Etacts). Airtable has raised over $350 million in funding from investors including Ashton Kutcher, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Benchmark, Thrive Capital, CRV Caffeinated Capital and Coatue Management.