Something to chirp about: Little Bird announces the addition of seasoned executive leadership

Portland’s Little Bird is rapidly growing up. The company has seen significant traction in the market with its service—one which helps folks find hidden gems of awesomeness on Twitter, be that people or content. And as a result, it’s starting to build out its executive staff.

Little Bird announced today that it has added two seasoned statrtup executives to its ranks.

Michael Jones has joined as CTO. Michael brings startup experience from the agency world, having been the Director of Technology at StepChange, the company which—following an acquisition by the Dachis Group—spawned the Upstart Labs accelerator.

Ben Kaufman joins as COO. Ben boasts a rich local startup history with senior roles at companies like Auctionpay and Monsoon Commerce.

So how can Little Bird afford to secure this kind of talent? Well, that’s the other part of the story. You see, Little Bird has also secured additional funding. Led by Oregon Angel Fund. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to $2.7 million.

“Little Bird is making social influencer data truly actionable, turning it into a profit center, by helping companies enable social selling programs,” said Oregon Angel Fund member Drew Bernard, who joins the Little Bird board of directors.

As CEO and cofounder Marshall Kirkpatrick puts it:

From the very beginning, our technology was different from other peoples’ – we don’t look at keywords people post online. Instead, we look at the connections between people: like Google analyzes the connections between web pages to find the best documents, we analyze the connections between people to find the most trusted and influential people in any field. (Like “9 out of 10 dentists recommend.”) Those people are valuable not just because of what they can do today, but because they’re a high-probability source of early knowledge about the future of your industry. Just like when I was a journalist, I had an unfair advantage of using systematic approaches to discover niche sources to monitor for breaking news – our users now have an unfair advantage of using our system to jump over the learning curve and engage right at the heart of their markets’ best minds.

For more information on the announcement, see the Little Bird blog. To request access to the service, visit Little Bird.

[Full disclosure: Little Bird is an alum of PIE. I am the cofounder of PIE.]

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy