Social annotation company Hypothesis announces new CEO

Hypothesis, a San-Francisco, California-based social annotation company, has announced a new chief executive that will help lead the organization continue to service its users in the educational, web app, and business sphere.

In a blog post, Hypothesis announced that the company’s vice president of revenue, Joe Ferraro, will step into the CEO role.

The company’s founder, Dan Whaley, will transition to the role of President and Chief Product Officer at the 13-year-old firm.

Hypothesis is an advanced web annotation software provider seeking to implement a real-time conversation layer over the entire web.

It enables sentence-level note-taking or critique on top of a diverse array of texts, such as blogs, legislation, articles, and news.

According to its website, the 25-person company has over 1 million users globally and has facilitated 65 million annotations thus far.

Through strategic partnerships with various organizations, the company aims to develop a platform for the next generation of read-write web applications in education, publishing, journalism, research, and technology.

Social annotation partners listed on their website include JSTOR, Canvas, and YouTube, among others, and Hypothesis has serviced leading universities including, the University of Minnesota, Indiana University and University of California, Santa Cruz, among others.

“Hypothesis has proven to be a key component of thousands of educators’ toolkits – driving further student engagement and academic success. With Hypothesis in your toolkit, an educator can expect a 5x improvement in student interaction with course material and build a solid foundation for further success as they pursue their degree,” said Joe Ferraro, CEO of Hypothesis.

“There is tremendous opportunity to continue to support more students and institutions and I’m looking forward to seizing this opportunity in conjunction with partners like JSTOR and Vitalsource as force multipliers. Combine that with our world-class team and Dan’s vision we are looking forward to bringing social annotation to every school in North America to unlock the potential for active, visible and social learning.”

Ferraro brings over 15 years of experience in the education sector to his new role.

He reportedly began his career in enrollment management and fundraising before transitioning to the vendor side, where he focused on creating equal educational opportunities, according to the company statement.

Prior to joining Hypothesis, Ferraro worked at Labster, where he “led the development of science education courseware, expanded the sales team significantly, and built robust go-to-market strategies for higher education and K12 institutions both in the US and internationally.”

Ferraro has been a member of the Hypothesis team for the past two years, leading revenue growth.

As for founder Dan Whaley, he will oversee the continued success of Hypothesis’ product for is users.

Dan will lead the charge in ensuring the continued success of our product for educational users, web app users, and business users as Hypothesis evolves into this new era.

Whaley sits on the board of several startups, including as a founding board member of car-sharing application Getaround. He was also a founding advisor and track chair for energy and the environment at Singularity University, the Silicon Valley-based educational platform founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil.

Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company