Anametrix Names CMO Thorogood as CEO, Replacing Founder Barrelet

After three years at the helm of San Diego analytics startup Anametrix, founder Blaise Barrelet has stepped aside as CEO, succeeded by Pelin Thorogood, the company’s chief marketing officer and a 20-year marketing and analytics strategist. Anametrix already is a global provider of Web-based marketing analytics for B2C companies.

The change occurred over the holidays, after Anametrix marked its third anniversary and a couple months after the company raised $4.4 million from TVC Capital, the software-focused private equity firm based in San Diego. Barrelet, who made his fortune as the founder of San Diego’s WebSideStory, remains chairman of Anametrix. In an e-mail yesterday, Barrelet tells me he wants to focus on developing his angel fund Analytics Ventures, although he also is glad to spend more time with his family.

Thorogood (pictured above), an analytics marketing consultant and executive in residence at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of management, joined Anametrix as chief marketing officer in July. She had served as senior vice president of marketing for WebSideStory while it was a public company, from 2004 to 2007, when Omniture acquired the San Diego analytics company. (Adobe Systems acquired Omniture in 2009.) Before joining WebSideStory, Thorogood was director of product marketing for four years at Peregrine Systems.

In his note yesterday, Barrelet writes, “Anametrix has never been better; perfect team, fortune 500 clients, $4M series A, big data technology and now a dream CEO who is a class A marketer. I’ve already done that with WebSideStory and I think Pelin is bringing a lot of new value to the table.

“I am glad to spend more time with my family. My mom is dying from a cancer right now and that teaches me a good lesson about what really matters in life. But that is not the reason why I replaced myself at Anametrix. I am very excited to develop my angel fund Analytics Ventures and help the high-tech startup community here in San Diego.”

In a statement released by the company, TVC partner Steve Hamerslag says, “As the lead investor in Anametrix’s Series A round, TVC Capital immediately recognized what a superstar we had in Pelin Thorogood. We are in the marketing-analytics business, and Pelin is one of a handful of true experts in the world.”

In the statement, Thorogood adds, “Both Anametrix and the digital analytics industry are at a tipping point of accelerated growth, and I’m honored to be the company’s new CEO during this pivotal time.” Anametrix says it also is moving its headquarters into a larger facility, more than doubling its current square footage, to accommodate the company’s expanding workforce across all departments, “including an expanding team of data scientists.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.