Best Buy exec named CEO at Angie’s List

Angie’s List has hired the man who built up Best Buy’s e-commerce business to be its new president and CEO.

Scott Durchslag takes over Tuesday and has his work cut out for him at the struggling Indianapolis online consumer review company. Its stock price trades at less than a third of its 2011 initial offering price of $13 and the company hasn’t posted an annual profit since its founding in 1995.

Angie’s had been hunting for a replacement for its first and only CEO, co-founder Bill Oesterle, since he resigned in the spring. Oesterle left to mount a campaign to lobby for statewide legal protections for people who are gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual.

In Durchslag, Angie List gets an executive with 20 years of experience in e-commerce and tech. That background should help Angie’s as it finds itself facing new competition from tech giants Amazon and Google, which are both setting up online consumer review sites for home services.

Angie’s, which announced Durchslag’s appointment Tuesday morning, said he headed electronic retailer Best Buy’s e-commerce and marketing business and helped boost online revenue from 11 percent of sales in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2013 to 26 percent a year later.

Durchslag previously worked as president of online travel agency Expedia.com and as chief operating officer at Skype Global, a provider of software and mobile communications services.

He also worked at Motorola, where he helped launch a version of its RAZR mobile phone, and at McKinsey & Co. management consultants, where he was a partner.

Durchslag, 49, made the rounds of Angie’s Near-Eastside campus on Tuesday to meet employees. He said he plans to move from Chicago to Indianapolis soon.

He acknowledged the new competition Angie’s faces, saying Angie’s needs to “fix fundamentals” and “take what we are currently doing and ... be great.”

“We need to take full advantage of this lead we have in this massive market and make the most of it,” he said in a phone interview.

Durchslag said one of Angie’s competitive advantages is “a treasure chest of big data” it has compiled on its 3 million members and thousands of service providers that perform hundreds of jobs for consumers, from plumbing to auto repair to medical care.

“Angie’s List is the only player at national scale” in its market, he said. “I really want to see us make the most of it.”

That valuable data is at the heart of a lawsuit Angie’s has filed against Amazon Local, accusing it of stealing provider lists and other proprietary information from Angie's website. In the suit filed in June, Angie’s says Amazon Local executives and other employees got access to the information by signing up as members of Angie's and copying provider profiles, member reviews and other information.

Chairman John Chuang said directors did an extensive search for a new CEO and “Scott distinguished himself as our top choice, having the broad range of experience and skills with both consumers and technology that we believe will take the company into its next phase of growth and value creation.”

Chuang suggested that directors want to see Durchslag turn Angie’s profitable. The company has survived on repeated infusions of cash from a long line of private investors. Chuang heads the Boston investment company TRI Investments, which is Angie's largest shareholder with 20 percent of its stock.

“Scott is an action oriented executive who understands how to ... drive profitable growth,” Chuang said in a statement.

Durchslag, who also joins Angie’s board of directors, said Oesterle wasn’t involved first-hand in hiring him and he hasn’t even spoken to Oesterle yet.

Durchslag is a graduate of the University of Chicago and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. The Harvard link is almost to be expected. Oesterle, Angie’s other co-founder, Angie Hicks, and Chuang all hold Harvard MBAs.

Durchslag said he bought a membership in Angie’s three years ago, when he was looking for a roofing contractor for his house.

At 2 p.m. Tuesday, Angie’s stock was trading up 16 cents, or 3.2 percent, to $5.20 a share.

Call Star reporter Jeff Swiatek at (317) 444-6483. Follow him on Twitter: @JeffSwiatek.