Playdom Hires Former Tech Analyst Quarles As CFO

Mountain View, California-based social game developer Playdom hired Christa Quarles, previously the internet services managing director at investment banking firm Thomas Weisel Partners, as its chief financial officer. Quarles spent almost a decade at Thomas Weisel Partners researching companies like Netflix, Yahoo, eBay, Google, and others. Prior to that, the Harvard MBA grad was a summer associate at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and an assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch. Her background as an analyst has given cause for some, like Silicon Alley Insider, which first noticed the appointment, to speculate that Playdom hired its new CFO as preparation for the company to go public. Quarles' hiring comes only a month after Playdom revealed that it raised $43 million in its first venture capital funding round. Playdom's social network games include Mobsters and Sorority Life, both available on Facebook and MySpace, though the developer has experienced more success with the latter service. Mobsters is currently the most popular game on MySpace with around 14.2 million users, according to data from Inside Social Games.