Zynga exec strikes out on her own

Zynga’s highly experienced top exec for social casino operations, Maytal Ginsburg Olsha, is to strike out on her own with a new social casino enterprise scheduled for launch early next year.

Olsha left Zynga last month, almost two years to the day after departing 888 Holdings, where she was senior vice president of corporate and regulated markets, to join the San Francisco-based social gaming firm and spearhead its online gambling ambitions (see previous reports).

Those ambitions have been toned down since Don Mattrick took charge of Zynga as CEO, shifting Olsha’s focus to social gaming, where she appears to have found a new professional niche.

Last week Olsha told the publication Venturebeat that she had raised sufficient capital to do her own thing, and had parted ways with Zynga in order to build an innovative social casino business, with an early 2015 launch scheduled for its first product.

Olsha graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand and RAU with an Honours degree in psychology and went on to obtain an executive MBA through the international Kellogg Recanati executive program.

She worked with a number of online gambling and marketing companies, including Ongame, Promomarket and IGMD Ltd prior to joining 888 and Zynga.