Twitch names Sara Clemens COO
Former Pandora COO takes over from co-founder Kevin Lin as Mark Weiler and Amir Shevat also join streaming site's executive ranks
Twitch today announced a trio of new executive hires, as the streaming site brought on Sara Clemens as COO, Mark Weiler as senior vice president and head of platforms and services, and Amir Shevat as vice president of developer experience.
Clemens is coming off a three year stint with the music streaming service Pandora, where she joined as chief strategy officer and left as COO. During her time there, Clemens was recognized in Billboard's list of Digital Power Players for 2015 and 2016. Prior to Pandora, Clemens also held executive positions at LinkedIn and Microsoft. As general manager of Microsoft's Xbox division (interactive entertainment), Clemens was involved in the creation of Hololens as well as the company's Xbox TV push. In her new role, Clemens "will oversee all commercial, operations and go-to-market teams and will be responsible for scaling the company's business functions as Twitch continues its international growth."
Clemens is replacing Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin in the COO role. The company said Lin will stay on with the company, leading the Culture, Strategy, & Innovation team and overseeing creation of new Twitch original programs.
Weiler joins the company from programmatic display advertising firm Rubicon Project, where he was a senior vice president and head of engineering. His Twitch responsibilities include all engineering and technical operations, from product development to information security.
As for Shevat, his most recent position was director of developer relations at Slack, but he also had multi-year stays at Google and Microsoft prior to that, working in developer relations for the former and helping build a developer ecosystem for the latter. As his new title suggests, he will be responsible for Twitch's developer-focused efforts. The founding leader of the company's developer program, Kathy Astromoff, will stay on as VP of developer relations and report to Shevat.
"Twitch has continued to grow at an amazing rate," Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said. "With our focus on listening to our community and providing the products and services to fuel their success, it's important that we continue to invest in a leadership team that will ensure we are bringing these things to market in a timely and effective manner. To that end, Sara Clemens, Mark Weiler, and Amir Shevat are all recognized leaders in their respective fields and extend Twitch's role as a leader in social video."