St. John

The San Francisco social networking upstart hi5 is starting to take on a Seattle shine. Seven months after tapping former AudienceScience executive Bill Gossman as CEO, the company is back in the Emerald City cherry picking talent.

This time it is a pretty big name from the gaming industry. Alex St. John, the outspoken founder and former CEO of Redmond-based WildTangent, has joined hi5 as president and chief technology officer. It is unclear whether St. John will be permanently based in San Francisco or Seattle, but for now he is making the commute to the Bay Area for the job, according to a hi5 spokesman. (We have an email into St. John -- who is traveling -- to get more details).

St. John certainly is a key hire as hi5 looks to ramp up its social gaming efforts, competing against the likes of Facebook and Zynga. [Post updated with comments from St. John and Madrona's Greg Gottesman]

According to a press release, the former Microsoft group manager and DirectX co-creator will oversee product development, network operations, technology and audience acquisition -- something he should be familiar with having grown WildTangent into one of the leading online gaming platforms. WildTangent now attracts more than 40 million monthly visitors.

St. John left WildTangent last fall, and shortly thereafter resurfaced as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Washington. It was widely believed at that time that St. John would be looking for a new startup to build, something he alluded to in an interview with TechFlash earlier this year.

"Being given free rein to shop around the computer science department for good ideas is really exciting," said St. John at the time. "The opportunity for me is to find the next exciting idea and play a role in its success in the marketplace."

But, it appears, that the allure of hi5 was just too much.

”The next wave of innovation and differentiation in gaming is happening in social gaming and hi5 is at the forefront of this sea change,” said St. John in a statement. “I’ve long said that the current generation of game consoles will be the last and that the future of the game business will be online."

Madrona Venture Group' Greg Gottesman, who sits on the board of WildTangent, said that St. John "eats, drinks and sleeps games."

He is brilliant both from a technical and business perspective," said Gottesman. "It's a great hire for hi5 as that company moves into the games space. Alex will undoubtedly play a major role in shaping the new strategy."

While not widely known in the U.S., hi5 has a solid base of users from which to build. The company attracts more than 60 million monthly visitors, many of whom are in the younger demographic.

“We are very excited to add a gaming visionary like Alex to the hi5 team as we continue our evolution into becoming a dominant, next-generation social entertainment platform,” said Gossman. “Alex’s background is a perfect fit for moving the company forward. His extensive experience and leadership in gaming platforms, traffic optimization, and game monetization make him a vital addition to the hi5 team.”

[Hat tip to VentureBeat, which scored an interview with St. John]

UPDATE: I just heard back from St. John, who said he was formally introduced to Gossman by Cameron Myhrvold of Ignition Partners. "Bill has a fantastic ad monetization and metrics background that matches very well with my gaming and commerce experience," said St. John, who will eventually relocate to the Bay Area.

I also asked why he took the job at hi5. Here's what St. John had to say:

"I saw what is now called the “social media” gaming wave coming a long way off and was frustrated that I might miss the party despite being a huge believer in it. I converted WildTangent to a microcurrency-advertising hybridized business model in 2007 in anticipation of this market. WildTangent however is growing so fast in the downloadable business that it would have been a distraction for the company to chase web based MMOG’s. I love making games but the place I wanted to play was in building monetization and publishing platforms. It would have taken me a couple years to build the kind of team and technology infrastructure hi5 already has and then there would be the problem of beating lots of talented competing game developers to the audiences with viral content. Hi5 has already mastered virality, they have the core team and infrastructure that is very difficult to duplicate whereas gaming technology and strategy comes easily to me. It may take a little while for people to realize it, but hi5 is about to jump to the head of the pack in social media gaming and entertainment as a result of this combination. While everybody else is grappling with the constraints of Facebook to reach their audiences, I’ll be making hi5 a native environment for social media game publishing and monetization."