VentureBeat hires Ken ‘Animal’ Beach as Chief Revenue Officer

Every now and again, VentureBeat experiences something where we look back later and recognize it as a major milestone.

I believe we just hit another such milestone with our latest hire: Ken Beach.

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Ken joins us as our first Chief Revenue Officer, as Folio Magazine reported today. He will be tasked with building out our national sales team and generally overseeing our business. He is joining us just as VentureBeat is about to reach 10 million monthly page views, a size that brings us into the “big leagues” of tech publishing.

Ken is the perfect person to lead our new direct sales effort. He’s something of a legend in the industry, having worked for 25 years at publishers like CNET, Ziff-Davis, and TechWeb. All of those publishers are strong in both enterprise and consumer coverage, and all are legacy players in an area where VentureBeat is emerging as a newer, dynamic play. I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Ken aboard.

“He’s an animal,” said Brian Burch, now of Symantec, who has worked across from Ken on several deals. “There are no distractions while he is working his magic.”

Burch’s comments echo what I’ve heard from several media executives: Beach lives for the sales deal; he’ll do whatever it takes to get the deal done. When he’s not strapped in an airplane, he’s negotiating deals in the gym on his smartphone, while at breakfast, or while watching a ballgame. Ken also likes having fun. Executives and former employees recount stories of partying uh, deal-making that can go late into the wee hours. But best of all, he’s a good dad and husband. Once, a major client asked Ken to have dinner on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The only problem: It was also on the eve of a CYO Championship football game Ken’s son was playing in, over in Delaware. So Ken did it all: He flew out to the Las Vegas dinner, took the redeye back to Delaware to watch his son play, and then took another redeye back to Vegas for the rest of CES. That’s classic Ken.

You’ll be seeing more of Ken out and about in Silicon Valley, New York, and Chicago as he makes his rounds. He says he is pretty excited about the big stories that are emerging right now: the big phone and tablet revolution, the cross-platform app development era, the massive play Microsoft is making with Windows 8 and Surface, the promise of Big Data, and the ever-changing games industry. With VentureBeat’s readership of influencers and decision-makers, these stories should be an easy sell for clients among both emerging companies and established enterprises. Beyond our own distribution, we’re also increasing our reach through more syndication deals with the Washington Post, Business Insider, Reuters, and, most recently, the Huffington Post.

Ken’s addition comes on the heels of two other appointments: Stacy Cohen, who joined us two years ago, has been promoted to Vice President of Sales for VentureBeat. Stacy, who is earlier in her career, has been on absolute fire, and has blown me a way with her energy and tenacity. We also added Angie Waters as Sales Director, East Coast, in April; she previously worked at Geeknet. She’s based in New York. Please join me in welcoming and congratulating Ken, Stacy and Angie in their new appointments.

You can reach Ken Beach at ken@venturebeat.com. Stacy is stacy@venturebeat.com, and Angie is angie@venturebeat.com.