Gil Penchina takes the CEO spot at Wikia, and other musical chairs

My good friend Gil Penchina, the former VP International of eBay, has taken the CEO spot of Wikia, the company offering a wiki-based infrastructure to build open editable communities, per the official press release. Mike Arrington and Gil have also recorded a TalkCrunch podcast, and I recommend listening/watching Gil's intervention at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.

Gil is a very active, and gifted, angel investor and even while being based in Paris and traveling all around, he has managed to get involved in a number of interesting companies here on the West Coast. From his LinkedIn profile:

Active angel investor in Linkedin, Wikia (wikipedia spinoff), Flock, Wink, Become.com, Vamoose, Paypal, Findwhat, Evite, Feedster, Betzip, Qype, Bounty, Properazzi, Military.com, eTour, Desktop.com and many more

I actually expected Gil to join a VC firm (and he definitely could have done so) but he decided to jump in the startup world - hats off for that, and I look forward to seeing what happens to Wikia in terms of growth and commercial success. Note that in true Wiki approach, the “About Wikia” page can be edited and I added Gil to the page since he was not listed there yet.

Today also saw other announcements, namely Tara “Pinko Marketing” Hunt leaving Riya, Philippe Kaplan passing the reigns of AdBrite to Iggy Fanlo and Mark Fletcher leaving Ask/Bloglines to look after his cats start thinking about his next company.

Photo credit: Esther Dyson

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