After 9 Years at the Helm, Kennedy will Continue as Topia Chairwoman & Expand Her Work as Industry Champion of Talent Mobility
Global Mobility Management (GMM) company Topia announced its founder and CEO Brynne Kennedy has stepped aside as CEO, naming veteran Human Capital Management (HCM) executive Shawn Farshchi as her successor to lead the award-winning company into its next phase of growth.
Kennedy founded the talent mobility company 9 years ago, establishing an entirely new category of HR management technology that has since grown into a $32 billion market. An award-winning executive who has earned numerous accolades for her innovation and visionary leadership at Topia (and previously as MOVE Guides), Kennedy has successfully steered the company through two major acquisitions (Teleport and Polaris Global Mobility), international expansion, numerous product launches and integrations and a strategic rebrand.
Kennedy will continue as Chairwoman on Topia’s Board of Directors and will remain active in support of external-facing media and industry initiatives. Recognized as an industry visionary and champion of technology-enabled global mobility, Kennedy also has a book due out this year from McGraw-Hill outlining best practices and success strategies for building successful agile organizations and leveraging talent mobility as a strategic advantage.
HR Technology Interview: TecHR Interview with Jesse Wolfersberger, Chief Data Officer at Maritz Motivation Solutions
“Building this company has been the most gratifying and humbling endeavor of my entire life, and I am eternally grateful for the energy and personal commitment our team has invested to make it such a success,” Kennedy said. “This transition is bittersweet, but at this point in Topia’s journey, Shawn’s proven track record in leading highly-successful public and private high-tech companies is exactly what we need to lead us into the next phase of growth.”
Farshchi is a seasoned executive with 30-plus years of experience in building, leading and advising highly-successful tech companies. An engineer by trade, Farshchi has served in executive leadership roles with Saba Software (acquired by Vector Capital), WebEx (acquired by Cisco), Oracle, Coremetrics (acquired by IBM), and Aryanka Networks, where he helped the company quadruple its revenue and customer base in less than three years.
HR Technology News: Appen Named #1 Company to Watch for Remote Jobs in 2019 by FlexJobs
His work spans a wide range of tech sectors from networking, managed services and SD-WAN-as-a-service to cloud-based talent management and marketing services platforms. Farshchi most recently founded Flype, Inc., providing an intelligent customer enablement platform to help companies build meaningful connections with their customers.
“I am extremely impressed with Topia’s SaaS-based approach to talent mobility and its strong market momentum and growth potential,” Farshchi said. “Brynne and her team have done an outstanding job of putting global mobility management on the must-have list for any successful company, and given the global nature of business, Topia is exactly the kind of comprehensive solution modern organizations need to drive future growth.”
HR Technology Interview: Jumpstart 2019: TecHR Interview with Tracy Malingo, SVP of Product Strategy at Verint