Tech Moves: Ex-Yahoo CMO joins Starbucks; Shape Therapeutics’ CEO steps down; Read AI grows team

Tressie Lieberman is Starbucks’ new executive vice president and global chief brand officer.

Lieberman is coming to the coffee company from Yahoo, where she was chief marketing officer for the past year.

She’ll be based in Seattle and report to CEO Brian Niccol, who took the company’s helm in August.

Niccol, the former Chipotle CEO, previously worked with Lieberman at the burrito giant where she served as vice president of digital marketing and off-premise.

Lieberman also held leadership roles for restaurant chains Snap Kitchen, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.

Her purview at Starbucks will include marketing, product, digital, creative and data analytics and insights.

Part of Niccol’s gameplan at Starbucks is to help reposition the company’s brand amid slumping sales. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Niccol is focusing on “the company’s hallmarks of selling handcrafted, premium coffee.”

“Starbucks is a brand people love. It’s time to tell our story again and reintroduce Starbucks to the world,” Niccol said in a statement. “Tressie is the perfect person to help us do that.”

At least three execs have left Starbucks since Niccol took over, the Journal reported.

Starbucks also announced today that its reshuffling the organization of some of its teams.

• Sara Trilling, executive vice president and president of Starbucks North America, will get new direct reports in an effort to “create clear accountability for the look and feel of our stores from concepts through design to development,” according to the company. They include Angele Robinson-Gaylord, who leads store development, and Dawn Clark, senior vice president and executive creative director.

• Starbucks is also uniting its Global Communications and Corporate Affairs in a single team. Dominic Carr will lead the group, adding “corporate affairs” to his previous title of chief communications officer. He will report to the CEO. AJ Jones II will keep leading the Corporate Affairs team and report to Carr.

— Francois Vigneault has stepped down as CEO of Seattle biotech startup Shape Therapeutics.

Chief Scientific Officer David Huss has taken the additional role of interim CEO as the company seeks a new chief executive.

“I’m eager to return to my passion for building groundbreaking early technology and taking on the next set of challenges across various industries,” Vigneault said on LinkedIn. “I reflect on my time with ShapeTX with immense pride in what we have built together.”

Vigneault co-founded the startup in 2018.

Shape has developed RNA editing technologies that can change the sequence of RNA, which encodes the body’s protein building blocks.

In 2021, the company signed a deal potentially exceeding $3 billion with pharma giant Roche to support the development of gene therapies for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

— Seattle startup Read AI hired Kate Reinmiller as vice president of operations, and Karin Rodriguez as principal recruiter.

Read AI launched three years ago and is using artificial intelligence to generate meeting summaries that include topics discussed, action items, questions and a video playback of AI-generated highlights.

“Both join at a critical time as we experience a step-up function in terms of growth,” said Read AI co-founder and CEO David Shim, announcing the news on LinkedIn.

Reinmiller’s previous roles include a combination of chief operating officer, co-founder and other leadership posts at MOGL, Boltive, Mixpo and others.

Rodriguez’s former employers include The UpGroup, Stanley, GoDaddy, Wyze Labs, Glowforge and others.

— Seattle startup DevZero hired Alberto Grande as its new head of marketing. Grande previously was vice president of marketing at X-Team, which provides companies with on-demand teams of software engineers. DevZero, which helps developers write code in the cloud, raised $26 million last year.