More AOL Tech Moves: HuffPo Tech Head Tim Dierks Out After Five Months
Dierks left Google to work for Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington back in September. He was first hired as Huffpo’s senior vice president of engineering and eventually replaced chief technology officer Paul Berry, who had helped Huffington build the site and left in February, a year after she sold the company to Armstrong.
As Kara Swisher reported earlier today, AOL CTO Alex Gounares is also leaving. The moves are indeed connected, says an AOL executive, since Dierks was Gounares’s hire.
Dierks’s position was a key one for Huffington, since her site thrived in large part because of its embrace of technology; part of the logic of the $315 million AOL/Huffpo deal was that she could inject that DNA into the company that acquired her.
Gounares and Huffington informed some AOL staff of Dierks’s departure during a conference call this afternoon. I’ve asked AOL PR for comment.
Update: Whole lot of shuffling going on at AOL today. TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld is out, too, replaced by recent hire Eric Eldon.
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