Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett plans to hire ‘100+’ people across the UK and US after announcing the appointment of Ada Pema as chief innovation and technology officer of Steven.com.
Pema, who previously spent six years at Amazon, has been tasked with building the company’s technology business from ‘the ground up’ and will report directly to Bartlett.
Bartlett has also announced a hiring spree for 100+ roles, with a particular focus on ‘world class technology and data talent’.
Current roles being advertised include several engineering jobs, a senior data scientist, a head of data intelligence and a senior product manager.
Last year, the serial entrepreneur told BusinessCloud his new company – Steven.com – had been valued at $425m (£320m) after closing a major eight-figure investment.
Bartlett said: “Ada is insanely qualified, but that is not the only reason we’ve appointed her to lead and build our technology business at Steven.com.
“As a Harvard grad who spent the last 6+ years at Amazon, she’s operated at a scale very few people in the world ever get to.
“Most recently she led product for Amazon and AWS AI, launching AI applications and agents for some of the biggest companies on earth.
“Before that she built Amazon’s global payments infrastructure, launching payment systems across 27 countries and more than 4,000 banks. And before Amazon she led product teams at Wayfair responsible for $6bn in revenue.
“However, Ada’s mentality, work ethic and total obsession with her work, is the reason she was the stand out executive amongst thousands of other candidates.”
Speaking to BusinessCloud last year, Bartlett said: “We want to build the company that is the Disney of the creator economy, much like Disney has Mickey Mouse as its IP and build a world around Mickey Mouse.
“We do the same around creators. We scale their reach, their audience, their community and the value of the IP. We commercialise it.”
The Dragons’ Den star recently finished filming as a guest Shark on the next series of the US business reality TV show Shark Tank.