October in the tech C-suite featured CTO shifts

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A new IT hire? That’s the ticket.

Here’s who was moving into the tech C-suite in October.

Ticketmaster hires Jim Freeman as CTO

After a string of cyber incidents, ticket sale and distribution giant Ticketmaster brought on Jim Freeman as CTO.

According to his LinkedIn, Freeman started at the company in July, but his appointment was not announced until October 19.

Freeman’s move to Ticketmaster comes after over a decade in leadership roles with some of the biggest companies in the tech sector. Until July, Freeman spent the last four-plus years as a senior technical advisor with a number of firms, including Permira. He’s also been in executive roles at Zalando SE and Amazon.

Freeman is one of a slew of recent IT hires at Ticketmaster; also brought onboard were Rachel Smith as SVP of data science and machine learning, Chuck Mortimore as SVP of product, and startup Ragie.ai’s team.

“Reliable, secure, and personalized experiences depend on how effectively we use technology and data,” Saumil Mehta, Ticketmaster global president, said in a statement. “Jim, Rachel, Chuck, and the Ragie.ai team will help us move faster, build better tools, and deliver better outcomes for fans, artists, venues, and clients.”

CTO Ali Dasdan dropped from Dropbox

Dropbox announced a series of job cuts in October, including the departure of CTO Ali Dasdan, who will officially step down on November 18.

Dasdan is leaving as the company cuts around 9% of its global workforce. In a memo to employees on October 28, co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi said that decision was part of an overall reorientation of priorities aimed at delivering on a two-year growth strategy.

“As part of these changes, we’ve made the decision to eliminate about 200 roles across Engineering, Product, Design, and G&A teams,” Alkarmi said.

Dropbox marks the latest stop in a career full of tech roles for Dasdan. Prior to joining the cloud storage company in July 2025, he was CTO at ZoomInfo for around two years; previous positions include head of engineering roles at Atlassian, Poynt, and Tesco.

As part of his severance package, Dasdan will receive a $1.3 million separation payment.

AWS snags 20-year Microsoft veteran for CTO

After over 20 years at Microsoft, Pedram Rezaei headed to AWS in October to become CTO.

It’s a coup of sorts for AWS, as Rezaei was helping lead Microsoft’s Superintelligence AI division prior to his hire. That seven-month stint as distinguished engineer and VP came after a more than 19-year career at Microsoft, including five months as Copilot CTO.

Rezaei’s work will focus on AWS AI assistant Quick and coding app Kiro, Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of agentic AI, said in a memo to staff announcing the hire.

“As many of you know, we have a major opportunity with Quick and Kiro to transform how work gets done,” Sivasubramanian wrote. “The number of users for Kiro doubled from Q1 to Q2, while monthly AI users for Quick grew 4x. Initially, Pedram will help work to bolster these product areas.”