New Jobs for Pair of Tech Execs

Motorola Inc. looked to Silicon Valley to lead the ailing cell phone giant after it has racked up some $6 billion in losses and slashed 50,000 jobs in three years.

Edward Zander, a managing director of Silver Lake Partners and a former Sun Microsystems Inc. exec, was named chairman and CEO of Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola. He succeeds Christopher Galvin, whose grandfather founded the company in 1928.

Zander, 56, joined the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Silver Lake – a private equity and buyout firm – last summer.

Though Zander had never been a CEO, he had been considered one of tech’s most qualified leaders and his name often popped up in CEO searches.

At Silver Lake, he was on the board of Seagate Technology and various nonprofits. Before going to Silver Lake Partners, Zander was president and COO of Sun, which he left in June 2002.

At Sun, he oversaw the development of Solaris and led the company’s network management, PC integration and software product suites.

Intuitive Choice

Meanwhile, Menlo Park, Calif-based Cardinal Venture Capital last week named former Intuit executive Eric Dunn a general partner.

Dunn joined Intuit when it was a four-person startup and helped it to grow to over 4,000 employees and $1 billion in annual revenue.

During his 14 years at Intuit, Dunn served as CTO and CFO and was CEO of Venture Finance Software Co., which Intuit created to commercialize Web-based consumer financial services.

“Eric’s knowledge and experience are ideally suited to helping early-stage companies grow and prosper,” says Derek Blazensky, general partner of Cardinal Venture. “His leadership in both technology and finance will prove invaluable to our portfolio companies.”

Most recently, Dunn has been an independent investor in early-stage technology companies.

Dunn sits on the board of Corillian (Nasdaq: CORI), PayCycle, BitPass and Environmental Software. And he has served as chairman of LiveCapital since 2001.