Tech Strikes: Lighthouse names CEO; Mariners rent Accolade director; and extra

— Ron Markezich will succeed Brian McManus as CEO of Seattle-based Lighthouse, which provides electronic discovery products and other services to legal and compliance teams.

Markezich previously was at Microsoft, most recently as corporate vice president in global commercial pricing and licensing. He has been a member of Lighthouse’s board of directors since 2019.

McManus led Lighthouse for 11 years, overseeing expansion from 50 to 1,000 employees and a 40-fold revenue increase, he said in a LinkedIn post. McManus will remain as executive vice chair.

— Eight months after Seattle’s Vera Whole Health combined with San Francisco digital healthcare company Castlight Health, the venture has a new CEO: former Cerner Corporation president Donald Trigg. The combined company also has a new name, Apree Health.

Trigg previously was chief revenue officer for digital health startup CodeRyte, which was acquired by 3M, and director of the office of policy at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Vera was founded in 2008 by Ryan Schmid, who until recently served as its CEO and is now president of Apree Health. Information about the location of Apree’s headquarters is not yet available, said a spokesperson.

Other key personnel moves across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:

• The Seattle Mariners hired their first senior vice president of business strategy and analytics, Chris Kennedy, previously senior director of government solutions at health company Accolade, and a manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

• Education company eSpark Learning hired Eric Dahlberg as CEO. Dahlberg, based in the Seattle region, was previously president at remote K-12 digital curriculum company MobyMax, chief revenue officer at legal marketplace Avvo, and served various roles at Microsoft.

• Reforestation startup DroneSeed hired Woolsey McKernon, former exec at Bayview Asset Management, as head of corporate development and capital markets, and Jonathan Loevner, former director at New Forests, as vice president of carbon markets.

• Expense management software startup Center hired Samantha Bergin as chief marketing officer. She previously held the same role at Seattle health company 98point6.

• Seattle-based Perkins Coie hired former federal judge Abdul Kannon as a partner in Seattle, where it is headquartered.
• Pearl Leung, head of community affairs in Bellevue, Wash., for Amazon, joined the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce’s new board of directors.
• Vancouver, Wash.-based construction labor marketplace Toolbelt hired Mark Raines as chief operating officer. Raines previously worked at EagleView, a Bellevue, Wash.-based geospatial software, aerial imagery and analytics company.
• Saman Zarandioon is now director of engineering at health data startup Truveta, where he was previously principal AI/machine learning engineer. Before joining Truveta, Zarandioon was a senior software engineer at Amazon.