Cruz Foam, the Santa Cruz-based company that has created an innovative biodegradable packaging alternative to Styrofoam, has added two new members to their team. 

Toby Corey, a successful entrepreneur who has held a variety of executive roles such as former President at Tesla and founder of Santa Cruz non-profit GetVirtual is joining in a full-time capacity as Cruz Foam’s Executive Chairman with Chief Revenue and Chief Financial Officer responsibilities. 

In addition, Leslie Nakajima will be joining in a full-time capacity as Cruz Foam’s Chief Marketing Officer reporting to Toby. Leslie Nakajima has a storied career in technology leading communications at large, global, publicly-traded companies including British Telecom, Nokia, and Sybase, as well as non-profits like Mozilla. 

John Felts, Cruz Foam co-founder, and CEO commented, “We are really excited to have Toby and Leslie joining us. They’ve both been with Cruz Foam since the early days as advisors when we were first taking our technology out of the research labs. Their incredible experience will maximize the impact of our first packaging products replacing harmful Styrofoam, positioning Cruz Foam for strong growth to become a leader in circular materials innovation.”

Toby has an extensive career from software test engineer for a toy company to Co-founder, President, and COO of USWeb, the world’s largest enterprise web developer, a successful IPO and $3b market cap, grew to $1b in revenue, with 5,000+ employees operating in 17 countries. In addition, he helped orchestrate his second IPO as Solarcity’s Chief Revenue Officer and played a major role through Tesla’s acquisition. He’s also been teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford University for 11 years.  Toby will be in charge of leading Cruz Foam’s day-to-day Sales, Marketing, Finance, Customer Experience, and Business Operations teams.

Leslie has led marketing in several units of Nokia and as CMO of Sentient and has deep startup experience including Onebox (acquired for $1B by Openwave), Sentient (AI startup funded by Li Ka-shing's Horizons Ventures), and Mapbox (a major Softbank Venture Fund company). She has also taught marketing and communications at the Sorbonne in Paris. Leslie will lead the growth of the company's communications and marketing efforts.

More information about Cruz Foam can be found on their recently refreshed website. Click the button below to visit.