BitGravity CTO Steps Aside

Written by Ryan Lawler

Wednesday, June 24. 2009 at 11:55 AM EDT Post a comment

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BitGravity Inc. co-founder Barrett Lyon has stepped down from his role as company CTO, and is being replaced by a new vice president of technology.

In an email exchange last week, Lyon told Contentinople to attribute any quotes from him as "co-founder of BitGravity," eschewing the CTO title that he held until very recently.

A quick look at Lyon's LinkedIn profile shows that the self-described "Entrepreneur and Purveyor of Powerful Ideas" held the CTO position until earlier this month, and is now back to his old job as "Map guy" at The Opte Project, a long-running effort to create a visual representation of the Internet.

Since then, we've learned that BitGravity has promoted Edward Crump as its new vice president of technology. Before taking the reigns as tech VP, Crump was BitGravity's director of engineering, where he did backend development for the CDN.

Prior to that, Crump served as VP of technology and director of engineering at Tadpole Inc., which is now owned by General Dynamics. He also founded SmartCalendar Inc., which provided calendar software for Websites around the time of the last Internet bubble.

It's unclear why Lyon left the company, but BitGravity stands behind Crump, as well as VP of engineering Perry Clarke, not only as the "cornerstones" of the company's software development, but as the right people to lead the company forward from the technology side.

"Ed Crump has been one of two cornerstones in the development of BitGravity's products from the company's beginning. Our content delivery network and live broadcast products would not be the world-class products that they are today without the technical innovations from, and leadership of, Ed Crump and Perry Clarke, BitGravity's VP of Engineering," BitGravity CEO Perry Wu said in a statement.

"As we enter a new stage of growth, the company will rely even more on Ed's technical leadership in our continued pursuit to deliver the highest-quality VOD and live broadcasting solutions at the best economics for our customers," Wu said.

While Lyon's departure could be a blow to the startup, the company still has a large reseller agreement with Tata Communications Ltd. (NYSE: TCL). BitGravity also received $11.5 million in convertible debt from Tata, in addition to $2.5 million in seed funding from Allen & Co. and Sling Media Inc. founder and CEO Blake Krikorian.