San Francisco-based AliveCor, which offers smartphone-enabled ECG devices, has announced former Google SVP Vic Gundotra as its new CEO.

Gundotra, who left Google in 2014 after eight years -- including a few heading up Google+, replaces Euan Thomson, an AliveCor board member and Khosla Ventures investor, who assumed the role of interim CEO in 2013. Gundotra becomes AliveCor's fourth CEO in almost as many years.

As interim CEO for more than two years, Thomson guided the company through many of its most important milestones, which included FDA clearance for three algorithms that boosted the capabilities of the AliveCor ECG device. The company says that as of October 2015 it has more than 20,000 regular users and 30 percent of its users have received an instant atrial fibrillation detection using the AF Detector algorithm feature in the AliveCor app.

“My time at AliveCor has been an important and fulfilling chapter in my career," Thomson said in a statement. "No one has done what we are doing. I am thankful for the opportunity to help develop products that are helping people across the world. I am pleased to welcome Vic who brings years of experience spanning consumer and technology products that will be of great value as AliveCor works to expand and diversify into different business models.” 

“I am thrilled to become part of the AliveCor team. What they have achieved throughout the past four years is tremendous,” said Vic Gundotra, chief executive officer of AliveCor. “Being able to understand what is going on inside heart disease through data analytics and machine learning has the potential to change the way we think of and participate in our healthcare. I am looking forward to being on the forefront of consumerizing medicine and working with an extremely intelligent team with innovative products.”

Back in 2013 when Thomson assumed the interim CEO post he explained to MobiHealthNews why finding a CEO for the company had proven to be a struggle.

“By definition, we are sitting in a leading edge field in medicine," he said at the time. "The number of companies that have gone through these cycles of development from being founded, to mainstream adoption, to maybe being acquired or going public, there really aren’t any major success stories in the field of mobile health that have gone through that established corporate cycle. Because of that, there really are no people with an established track record of nursing companies and nurturing companies through the complete cycle. Really what you are looking for in terms of leadership is different from what you are looking for in terms of the type of leadership in a conventional medical company."

Thomson indicated that the CEO of AliveCor might not come from a healthcare background, and the eventual choice proves that out -- Gundotra worked at Microsoft as an engineer prior to Google. The focus of the future CEO search would instead be on translatable skills.

"Do they have core skills in one area that are adaptable and able to be translated into all the areas that the company needs to be overcoming in order to grow? In this field, inasmuch as we are defining new technologies, we are defining new companies — we are defining new leaders,” Thomson said at the time.

While he was an interim CEO, Thomson had always made clear he wasn't in a rush to give up the title. In 2013 he felt he had a lot of work to do to establish AliveCor before bringing on a new leader.

“We need to cement that into the company and then we will have a much clearer idea, not just for ourselves, but for the person who would come in as CEO," he said. "We could give them a much clearer vision and give a much clearer remit to whoever comes in if we go through that exercise first.”