Quick take:
Doodles, the Web3 entertainment company behind its eponymous NFT project, has expanded its leadership team with three new hires.
Founded by Jordan Castro, Evan Keast, and world-renowned visual artist Scott Martin, Doodles has become a blue-chip NFT project that saw over $500M in trading volume within its first year. It also operates the Doodlebank, a community treasury that funds upstart ideas from its collectors, ultimately giving the community a say in how the Doodles brand expands.
Over the past week, the company has onboarded Austin Hurwitz, Joe Ranzenbach and Jay Ciruolo to lead business development, product management and frontend engineering respectively.
Hurwitz announced his first day as head of business development at Doodles on Monday and said that he is looking forward to “partnering across the industry to develop the most joyful products and experiences in the world for our holders.”
He is the founder of Web3 advisory firm Chasing Curiosity and held the roles of VP of music operations, product team lead, and finally SVP of Web3 & Community at music distribution platform, Venice. Before that, he spent five years at Amazon as a strategic vendor specialist for amazon outdoors and content acquisition manager for Amazon Music.
Doodles’ new head of product management Joe Ranzenbach joined the company last week, marking his first role at a Web3 company. He was previously the VP of product at Cardlytics, an advertising platform in banks’ digital channels.
Prior to that, Ranzenbach spent more than four years leading product strategy and product management at digital media firm Integral Ad Science. He was also the product manager at advertising services company Place IQ and VP at financial data provider PrivCo.
Jay Ciruolo, the co-founder of comedy collectible platform Jambb, joins Hurwitz and Ranzenbach as part of Doodles’ latest leadership hires, leading the company’s frontend engineering. He brings 17 years of experience building and designing products to Doodles. He was previously the director of engineering at AssetBlock, a startup that provides travel technology services, and was a senior software design engineer at Hubspot.
Last June, Doodles appointed American rapper Pharrell Williams as Chief Brand Officer and in September completed a fundraise of $54 million led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six.
According to its LinkedIn page, Doodles is still looking to expand its team with job openings for a head of marketing, head of business affairs, and senior front-end engineer.
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