Blizzard Entertainment Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja will be leaving the gaming company to join Jack Dorsey‘s online financial service Square, Inc. this month as CFO, it was announced Thursday.
Ahuja has been with Activision Blizzard in numerous finance and strategy roles for the past eight years. These include Vice President of Finance and Operations and Vice President of Strategy and Business Development. Prior to her work at Blizzard, Ahuja held various roles at Fox Networks Group, the Walt Disney Company, and Morgan Stanley. She received her M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and her A.B. from Duke University.
“In Amrita, we have found an amazing, multidimensional business leader,” said Dorsey, who founded Square in 2009. “Amrita brings the ability to consider and balance opportunities across our entire business, and she will help strengthen our discipline as we invest, build, and scale. She is willing to challenge herself and others, has the courage to take principled risks, and is passionate about our customers and our purpose.”
“I’m incredibly inspired by Square’s purpose as it has personal resonance for me,” said Ahuja. “My parents were the type of entrepreneurial business owners for whom Square was created. I believe Square is building the most innovative commerce ecosystem for sellers and consumers, and I am excited to help the company execute against this massive opportunity.”
Popular on Variety
The hiring of Ahuja comes just three months following the departure of long-time Square CFO Sarah Friar who took her leave from the company last year to head the neighborhood social networking site Nextdoor as CEO.
Ahuja’s departure from Blizzard is the second high profile exit from Activision Blizzard this week. On Jan. 2, Netflix announced that Spencer Neumann — previously CFO of games company Activision Blizzard and a former Disney finance exec — was joining the company as chief financial officer.
Reports of Netflix’s hiring of Neumann hit late Monday, after Activision Blizzard said in a regulatory filing that it was planning to fire Neumann. On Wednesday, Activision Blizzard said Neumann was “terminated for cause for violating his legal obligations to the company,” an indication the company believes he breached his employment agreement.
Neumann’s contract with Activision Blizzard ran through April 30, 2020, and included a standard “covenant not to shop” clause stipulating that with the exception of the final six months of the term of his employment he was barred from negotiating for a job “with any entity or person outside of the Activision Blizzard Group,” per a regulatory filing from Activision.
