VarageSale co-founder Carl Mercier has stepped down from his position as CEO of the company, and will be taking the position of chief product officer.
“As founders, product vision is not something you can outsource,” said Mercier in a Medium post. “There’s still so much we want to accomplish, and I am thrilled to be once again at the helm of what I consider one of the most important aspects of our company: the product.”
He added that the company will be making significant investments in its product over the next two years. This is not the only restructuring we’ve seen out of VarageSale recently, as the company earlier this year laid off 26 employees, including its VPs of engineering and product.
“In an effort to streamline our operations, we unfortunately had to let go of 26 talented employees today,” said Mercier at the time. “The result is ultimately what we believe we had to do to continue building towards our vision.”
Taking Mercier’s place as CEO will be Andrew Sider, who has worked closely with Mercier in the past. Sider was part of the founding team of BandPage, which YouTube acquired in 2010, and co-founded Bunch, a mobile discussion platform that VarageSale acquired in 2014 (interestingly enough, Sider offered Mercier a CTO position at Bunch while he was in the midst of creating VarageSale). Since then, Sider has acted as VP of Growth at the company.
“I always knew I wanted to work with Andrew and to make this happen, we acquired Bunch. I’m now delighted to make him CEO. Full circle,” Mercier said. “The Board has got to know Andrew very well over the last couple of years and has therefore been very supportive of this decision.”
We’ve seen this trend of prominent Canadian CEOs stepping down in hardware companies — early in December, Muse CEO Ariel Garten stepped down to focus on her family, while Nymi CEO and founder Karl Martin stepped down to CTO.