VP of marketing Chris Tolles will take Rich Skrenta’s CEO job running news-aggregating site Topix, with Skrenta taking over management of the Topix board of directors.
It hasn’t been very long since Topix moved from a focus on news aggregation to a more local search/community orientation. Although Skrenta led the company through that change and beyond, Tolles will take over from here.
Tolles discussed the changeover at the Topix blog. Though all is going well at Topix, including a place in the Hitwise top 20 news & info sites for May 2007, Skrenta evidently did not relish the role of being more of a salesman than a coder:
Rich told me that he wasn’t having as much fun right now, and looking at what we needed to do, didn’t see much opportunity for what he really loves to do — architect from the metal on up and put out the 1.0 that is so far ahead of everything else – the first computer virus, one of the first MUD’s, NewHoo/dmoz, Topix – that even his no good co-founders couldn’t screw things up. No, we had just deployed the big new re-invention, and now it’s time to keep tweaking it, and also push up the marketing and sales efforts a couple of notches. Rich would rather chew off his arm, I think.
Skrenta won’t have to look for the salt and pepper, though. Tolles will report to him, but the real day to day duties will be on Tolles’ shoulders. That leaves Skrenta some freedom to cook up something new. Perhaps his recent blog post about social networking provided a peek into Skrenta’s latest interest.
