Nearly six months after scoring an attention-grabbing funding round of $100 million, service marketplace Thumbtack has attracted two new big name executives to help oversee its ambitious growth plans for the months ahead.
Thumbtack is announcing today it’s brought on former Google executive Mark Schaaf to serve as its first VP of engineering, and former Apple design director Vander McClain to serve as its first VP of design.
In an interview, Thumbtack co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta said that the executive team buildout comes as the company is working to expand its entire team significantly. Thumbtack currently has 80 staff at its San Francisco headquarters, and expects to end the year at a headcount of 200 (the company also has operations and customer support staff in Salt Lake City and the Philippines.) More than half of the new hires at Thumbtack’s headquarters are expected to be on the engineering and design teams, he said. “This is a huge hire for us. We have to grow the team tremendously, and with Mark and Vander we have two people we can really believe in to help lead the growth.”
According to Zappacosta, Thumbtack is currently facilitating $2 billion annually in services through its platform.
Mark Schaaf comes to Thumbtack after spending four and a half years at Google, where he worked as a Senior Engineering Director. He joined the company as part of Google’s acquisition of AdMob, where he was an early employee and engineering lead. In an interview, Schaaf said he was particularly looking forward to helping build and improve Thumbtack’s algorithms, such as those for matching service providers with consumers and calculating pricing.
“My passion is in building startups and building engineering teams, and I looked long and hard for the right opportunity after coming out of Google,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m excited about the opportunity here to solve a lot of technology problems, and to develop algorithms in the space. A lot of these marketplace challenges are similar to what I worked on in the ads world, matching two different parties.”
Vander McClain spent the past three years as the global creative director for Apple’s online store. His resume also includes work on a number of prominent technology and consumer brands, such as Autodesk, HP, and Crate & Barrel.
