Astro Teller says he stepped down last week as chief executive officer of Downtown medical device developer BodyMedia Inc. because he wanted to avoid becoming a "cliche" -- the technically skilled founder who lingers too long in the CEO suite.

	Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Astro Teller, above, has stepped down as chief executive officer of Downtown medical device developer BodyMedia. Click photo for larger image.

"I never wanted to be that person," Mr. Teller said yesterday as he introduced his successor, West Coast executive Fernando Sanchez, who started Dec. 26.

But the 36-year-old Wunderkind is not abandoning the company he and three other Carnegie Mellon University graduates started seven and a half years ago. In fact, Mr. Teller is keeping his seat as chairman and taking the additional title of chief research and strategy officer.

BodyMedia board member and venture capitalist Jay Katarincic, who has directed about $4 million in investment money to the company since 2001, gives Mr. Teller "credit" for "realizing where his strengths lie and making the decision to bring in someone who had more day-to-day sales and marketing" experience.

A lot of guys in Mr. Teller's position, Mr. Katarincic added, would refuse "to give up the reins."

Mr. Katarincic, managing director of Downtown-based Draper Triangle Venture, remains "very confident that this will be a very valuable company." Revenues are up, according to Mr. Katarincic, the company ships thousands of its body monitors every month to clinicians and health-conscious consumers, and the days of nearly running out of cash are over.

"I don't need those days to come back," he said.

Yesterday's announcement represents a significant shift toward more experienced management at a 36-person company once hailed as one of Pittsburgh's most promising startups in the period immediately after its launch in 1999. It still is one of the few technology stars to remain intact after the widespread industry bloodletting in the early part of this decade.

Although all four co-founders still work at BodyMedia, Mr. Teller is the company's most recognizable public face due to celebrity (his grandfather was the late physicist Edward Teller) and brainpower (he is a published novelist, artificial-intelligence expert and past founder of another tech company, Sandbox Advanced Development).

He scored a slew of early publicity for his firm, even as it tottered on the brink of failure. When a reporter with The Wall Street Journal followed Mr. Teller around in 2001 for a series of stories, Mr. Teller was open about the firm's early struggles -- BodyMedia nearly ran out of cash three times in its first two years -- and the company's first attempts to roll out an electronic armband that monitored heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns and burning of calories while downloading the data to a computer so it could be analyzed and tracked over time.

Even back then, Mr. Teller knew BodyMedia had to move from being "a design and development company to a transactional, sales, marketing and operations company," he told the Journal.

Asked yesterday why the company decided to search for a new CEO, a process initiated a year ago, Mr. Teller echoed the comments he made five years ago, saying the company is "overdue to complete the transition from a technology company and a product company to a sales and marketing company."

Mr. Sanchez -- most recently a senior vice president with surgical instrument maker Arthrocare Corp. and formerly with Medtronic, Cordis, Sony and Vodafone -- provides the business and operational experience Mr. Teller lacks.

But the hiring should not be interpreted as a sign of any problems at BodyMedia, Mr. Teller said. Rather, BodyMedia "is ready to take the next couple of steps and is going to take those steps most aggressively and most expertly with somebody driving the day-to-day operations of the company who is world class at doing those things," he said.