SAN FRANCISCO AND WATERLOO, December 1, 2021 – TextNow, the leading mobile app offering free cellular and WiFi-enabled phone service, today announced that Dave Chiang has joined its senior leadership team as Chief Product Officer. Dave brings more than 20 years of technology and media experience to TextNow, where he will report to CEO and co-founder Derek Ting and oversee engineering, product, and analytics as the company scales its digital communications platform.
Dave is a growth-oriented product leader with a strong track record of identifying, building, and launching innovative business categories. Prior to TextNow, Dave played a crucial role in turning Walmart Connect into a profitable business, tripling revenue and increasing the size of the team from 20 people to more than 200. As a senior executive at the world’s largest retailer, he led a global team and oversaw ad operations, business operations, creative, analytics, and tools product development at its leading retail ad network. Recently, Dave was Vice President of Digital and eCommerce at Splunk, where he was responsible for driving the marketing pipeline for digital sales and owned growth across all channels.
“We are on track to surpass $100 million USD in revenue this year, and we have big ambitions to grow far beyond that. Dave’s unique background in engineering and product, combined with his experience leading the development of new product categories, makes him the perfect fit at this stage of our growth,” said Derek Ting, CEO of TextNow. “As we scale our platform and continue to grow our customer base of 10 million monthly active users, bringing our product and technology functions under Dave’s leadership will be invaluable.”
Dave has extensive experience developing products, solutions, and partnerships, including PayPal’s 1st B2C social payments product, introducing data licensing to eBay, building a new programmatic advertising business for CBS, and leading Facebook’s largest Advertising and Measurement solutions.
“TextNow has an amazing opportunity to democratize phone service and make it truly accessible to all,” said Dave Chiang, Chief Product Officer at TextNow. “I look forward to helping build on the success of the TextNow team with exciting new growth areas and a best-in-class mobile experience.”
Based in Cupertino, Dave holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. from the University of California, Davis. He also serves as an advisor to early-stage start-ups, including Teleseat and Placements.io.
About TextNow
Founded in 2009, TextNow is the largest provider of free phone service in the U.S. With offices in San Francisco, Waterloo, and Portland, the TextNow app has been downloaded more than 200 million times globally, helping millions of people stay connected with a free phone number and ad-supported calling and texting over WiFi and a nationwide LTE network. For more information visit https://www.textnow.com/.
Media Contact:
Nick de Pass