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odd Papaioannou, vice president and chief cloud systems architect at Yahoo! bid adieu to Yahoo! when he announced that he is moving out from the company to take part in a VC firm Battery Ventures as an entrepreneur. Its a loss to Yahoo as one of their key leader was moving out of the company. GigaOm reported Todd’s departure.
Taking about Battery Ventures, the Venture Capital firm has its offices in Herzliya, Israel, Waltham, Mass and in California’s Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Since 1983, the firm has been able to raise 4 billion USD in funds. Enterprises such as Witness Systems, Vastera, SigmaTel, Qtera, Pixelworks, Nextel, Infoseek, HNC Software, FORE Systems, Allegiance Telecom and Akamai Technologies have been backed by Battery Ventures.
Talking about Todd’s role, he would be with the firm’s investment team and would help them in identifying technologies which are disruptive. The time frame decided as for now is 3 – 5 years. The ‘help’ would include building the best possible scalable enterprise software for the Battery portfolio companies which are currently in existence. Additionally would even include new idea developments which would be investment-related.
In Yahoo, Todd was the head of the Yahoo’s Hadoop teams and cloud computing for strategic direction. Yahoo had made Todd the head of cloud systems in July 2010 when Chuck Neerdaels had resigned. In a span of just more than a year, he had helped Yahoo! in defining IT strategy of the company on the whole. Todd’s background before joining Yahoo was even noticeable as his background has a big-data-oriented storage. He had been with Teradata prior to Yahoo. Teradata was a data warehouse where Todd had been into a number of software architecture jobs for a period of five years. But Greenplum can be called his base for experience where he served as the director of engineering and chief architect.
Todd in his detailing to GigaOm said that he departed from Yahoo to fulfill his personal predilections.
He even said that his background talks more of enterprise and consumer software. He however didn’t fail to recognize that Yahoo was his internal IT’s first gig and that it was a great experience. For now, he plans to move back in the shipping software, so that he can once again have that competitive experience which is in the market against other softwares.
Todd might even have the convenience as Battery Venture’s West Coast office is located in San Francisco Bay Area, which is also his place of residence. There are in fact nine more partners of Battery Ventures which war located at the same place.
On Yahoo’s part, it looks like Yahoo would have to face a bit of inconvenience as Todd is out when Yahoo was just building upon a few new establishments.