I learned from the Business Times yesterday that Alverix has installed a new CEO, replacing the investor who had the interim role since the funding.  A good thing too as neither Startup CEO nor Managing Director of the life sciences group at Safeguard Scientifics is a part-time job.  I just had two thoughts on the matter.  First to note that the new CEO, James Merselis, worked for just one large company from his early twenties to his mid-forties.  He spent those 22 years rising through the ranks of Boehringer Mannheim Diagnostics (NKA Roche Diagnostics.)  Not perhaps the career path everyone would suggest to a 22-year-old who asks how to become a startup CEO.  

The clichéd wisdom of the search world is that one wants such an executive's introduction to startups to be in someone else's company and that after that first startup experience he or she is more valuable.  Certainly his experience at Hemosense has had more liquid results than that at Micronics. 

Anyway, my other thought regards the connections by which people end up under consideration for a role like this.  I don't have any inside knowledge of how James and the Alverix board got together but I do think this little chain is interesting.  Before the spinout from Avago, Alverix entered some sort of partnership with a company called Chembio.  James joined the Chembio board this past March.  I don't, of course, know how he and the board at Chembio connected but Inverness Medical, to whom he sold Hemosense, has an exclusive deal to market Chembio's products. Social Networking boosters, make of it what you will.

At Network World, Tim Greene has an interesting interview with Joe Golden, the new CEO at ConSentry.  After a long search the board has brought in a fellow VC from Accel's London office.  Peter Wagner, from Accel, is on the board.  He makes all the right noises about loving the technology and prospects of ConSentry, but this is his first CEO role and first non-investment professional role in a long time.  No doubt he's a smart guy, but I have to wonder how the board would have reacted to an anonymous resume identical to his, if they were looking for someone to grow the company.  On the other hand there might be reasons to hire a CEO who's spent some years in the Cisco M&A department.  Either way, let's wish him luck. 

Back on the topic of Avanex for a minute.  The choice of headlines in their front page news section tells an amusing if almost certainly misleading story.  I say almost because I don't actually know the story, and I say misleading because the 3rd quarter result in that middle story are quite solid and the addition of Dennis Wolf (congratulations Dennis) seemed welcome.  Anyway, I found it amusing how one would draw one conclusion based on reading just the headlines and another if one clicks through.  But that could just be me; I do sometimes find myself laughing alone. 

Lightreading's Raymond McConville has an excellent rundown on the excitement at Avanex: CEO fired and CFO quits.  I don't have a lot to add but I do wonder why they are bothering with a search when they have a ready-made CEO in the company in Pat Edsell.  As SVP & GM he's already running a big piece of the company and he's been a CEO multiple times in the past.  Does he also not see eye-to-eye with the board?  Does he not want the job?  If I were looking for a CEO for an Avanex-like company, he'd be at the top of the list. 

The good folks over at Portfolio.com have a couple of notes up on the just officially announced addition of Marc Andreessen to the board at Facebook wondering about the apparent confilct of interest and about any mention of a business plan.  Outsiders on the boards of private companies are more an more common and in this case adding a non-VC voice was probably a good idea.  Andreessen is certainly an industry luminary and his driving of the birth of the modern internet no doubt gives him plenty to add.  On the other hand, his experience is quite similar to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's.  Netscape and Loudcloud are well known for success in the phase that Facebook is now completing, that is building a new fantastic product and rapidly growing a productive engineering group.  They are not so famous for the next step, the one that's now in front of Facebook: taking that cool, attractive product and rapidly grown team and turning them into a money making machine.  Still Mark and Marc should get along well and we'll just have to hope they're right together more often then they are wrong together.  It may be that with Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel on the board he has alternate viewpoints enough.