Brendan Lewis, who held corporate communications posts at Shazam, Foursquare and LivingSocial, has landed at startup lab Expa as VP of communications.
Lewis exits the tech-savvy PR group Pramana Collective for the post, which is mainly based in New York with monthly stops in Expa's San Francisco base.
Expa started up in 2014 as a "studio" to work with tech entrepreneurs and the company itself was funded with about $50M in seed money from former eBay chief Meg Whitman and Virgin companies' founder Richard Branson.
In a blog post, Lewis said he will help shape overall company strategy, handling corporate, consumer and B2B communications, and assist in product launches, among other tasks.
He previously held corporate posts at Juniper Networks, VeriSign, and American Management Systems, and worked on the agency side with 463 Communications and Edelman.
Established through a founding gift from 2025 Page Hall of Fame inductee and former Weber Shandwick Global CEO Andy Polansky, the fund is meant to serve as a catalyst for empowering future senior communications leaders as well as increasing the diversity in the chief communications officer pipeline.
Some well-honed communications strategies typically deployed in an activist situation must be set aside when the activist is also the founder of the company. Such situations require a more tailored response: one that respects the founder’s credibility without conceding the company’s future, addresses shareholders’ financial interests while acknowledging questions of legacy, and anticipates that the fight may be as personal and persistent as it is strategic.
Molly Fogarty, who rose to head of corporate affairs & sustainability at Nestle during a nearly 23-year stint, will join Brunswick Group as a partner in DC on Sept. 14.
Senior leaders have been exiting newly combined agencies since the wave of integrations started—the kind of departures that don't always make headlines but show up in who's running client accounts six months later.
Why CEO visibility is no longer optional as a communications tactic.
