Dr Gavin Wood relinquishes CEO role at Parity to co-founder Björn Wagner

In a Parity Leadership Update today, Dr Gavin Wood, one of the initial co-founders of Parity Technologies has given up his CEO role to a fellow co-founder Björn Wagner. Wagner is the founder of the Ecosystem Development division.

Gavin assumed the chief executive officer (CEO) role after the last of the initial Parity co-founders exited in late 2020.

Why Gavin relinquished the CEO position

Gavin relinquished his CEO role to become the Chief Architect at the company, a role he is very passionate about.

While announcing the new CEO, Gavin said:

“The role of CEO has never been one which I have coveted (and this dates back long before Parity). I can act at being a CEO well enough for a short while, but it’s not where I’m going to find eternal happiness. A good CEO needs to be available to others on a far more continuous basis. They need to enjoy representing the company, both internally and externally. They need to not be bothered by large swathes of their time becoming eaten up in meetings and calls with a plethora of multicoloured boxes on their calendar.”

Gavin believes that the CEO role hindered him from doing what he does best, being a “thinker, coder, designer, and architect” through the many external meetings he had to attend as the company’s CEO. Gavin has spent much of the past two years presiding over the outfitting of our C-suite.

The appointment of Björn to the CEO position and Jimmy Cliff to the COO position will allow Gavin to return to work full-time where he says he belongs.

Gavin is the majority shareholder at Parity

Most importantly Gavin remains the company’s majority shareholder and he said that there is little chance that the role of CEO ever be filled by a person he does not know and trust.

In the company leadership update, Gavin said:

“There was little chance of this role ever being appointed to anyone I did not already know and trust for many years: as the company’s majority shareholder and someone who intends to be working within it for some time to come, I care deeply about its culture.”

In the update, Gavin also said that he will focus more on exploring ways to make Polkadot (DOT/USD) and Web3 more relevant in the world by “helping the community design and build several interesting chain-integrated social primitives.”

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