DATASTAX - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- EVP & CIO at PayPal
- Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer for PayPal Holdings, Inc
- Technology and Executive
Brad Gyger has spent over 20 years helping Developers, Architects, Technology practitioners and leaders solve hard problems at global, web scale. Brad has held various customer-serving roles at firms like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Symantec, Engine Yard, Heroku, Salesforce.com and Zeplin. Brad is the co-author of Professional of Heroku Programming: an Architect's Guide. Brad is a graduate of Indiana University, Bloomington.
Job Titles:
- CEO
- Chairman
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Chairman & CEO / San Jose, CA
- Chairman and CEO of Data
Chet Kapoor is Chairman and CEO of DataStax, the real-time AI company. With more than two decades of leadership across tech giants like Google, IBM, and BEA Systems, Chet has always thought about infusing AI into businesses at scale. With his roots at Steve Jobs' company NeXT, Chet learned the power of working with incredible people who want to change the world. This insight helped fuel his career and he ultimately took the helm of Apigee as CEO in 2007 where he saw APIs as a platform for bringing AI to the enterprise.
After a successful IPO and eventual acquisition of Apigee by Google, Chet dug in and recognized the solution to deeply enabling AI at scale was to start with data. His journey culminated when he became the CEO of DataStax in October 2019. With a focus on strategy, operations, and people, the company launched Astra DB-a pioneering DBaaS powered by Apache Cassandra-and seamlessly integrated real-time AI with streaming capabilities and event processing engine, Kaskada's, feature store. Now, with vector search for generative AI, DataStax customers can build massively scalable AI agents and deliver powerful apps leveraging generative AI.
Chris Vogel has more than 30 years of Silicon Valley-based leadership experience in sales engineering, IT, consulting, support, and customer success at companies including Google, Oracle, BroadVision, BEA Systems, and Apigee. While at Apigee, Chris was an executive team member and helped lead the company through a successful 2015 IPO and 2016 acquisition by Google. Prior to DataStax, Chris led worldwide customer engineering for the Business Application Platform team in Google Cloud.
Chris has a successful track record of architecting and executing innovative and transformational go-to-market strategies and customer success engagement model, and he's got a passion for company culture and people development. He earned a B.S. in Applied Math from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Don Dixon brings over 20 years of industry experience leading Silicon Valley technology companies. Prior to joining DataStax, he led finance at Skyhigh Networks, completing a successful sale of the company to McAfee. Prior to Skyhigh, he led finance and, subsequently, operations at Apigee, overseeing the API platform provider's successful IPO. Prior to Apigee, Don served in various finance and operations positions at BlueCoat Systems and BEA Systems. Don began his career at KPMG where he earned his CPA.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Product
Job Titles:
- General Partner
- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- General Partner
- Member of the Board of Directors
Harry Ault has more than 20 years of Silicon Valley-based sales leadership experience. He has established a track record of successful go-to-market strategies and ecosystem development, and has managed multiple $1B+ enterprise revenue engines to growth, repeatability, and scale.
Harry received his B.S. from Pennsylvania State University and earned his graduate degree from the University of Michigan.
Jake Luciani has over 20 years of experience in the areas of distributed systems, finance, and manufacturing. He is a member of the Apache Foundation and is on the project committee of the Apache Cassandra, Arrow, and Thrift projects. Jake received his B.S. in Computer Science from Lehigh University along with a minor in Cognitive Science.
Jason McClelland has over 25 years in tech. Jason started his career as a developer and product person before moving into sales and marketing at Adobe, where he helped Adobe with their SaaS and Enterprise business transformations, with Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud respectively. After Adobe, Jason joined as Heroku as their CMO, where he worked alongside DataStax' CRO Brad Gyger through the acquisition and integration into Salesforce. Much of Jason's experience is in helping companies create new categories, transforming their brands, and building large-scale PLG-Enterprise motions, with much of the focus being on deeply technical audiences.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Technology Executive
Job Titles:
- Managing Director
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Managing Director in Growth Equity
Joe is a managing director in Growth Equity within Goldman Sachs Asset Management, with oversight of the Growth Equity business unit in San Francisco. He is a member of the Asset Management Corporate and Growth Investment committees. Joe earned a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA.
Job Titles:
- Board Advisor
- Chief
- Member of the Board of Directors
Jose Morales is the Chief Revenue Office of Freshworks. Freshworks provides innovative customer and employee engagement solutions, including FreshDesk, FreshService, and FreshCRM and has 50,000 paying customers around the globe. He joined Freshworks from Atlassian, where he spent the last 10 years. At Atlassian he built and led the field operations organization which included direct and indirect sales, partner programs, services and other key GTM functions. The organization included teams supporting the self-serve business to field sales organizations closing seven figure deals in the global 2000. Jose joined Atlassian when they were sub $100M in revenue and helped grow them to over $1.8B. During that time he built teams in many countries including the US, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines. In addition to field operations, Jose ran corporate development for 5 years completing many acquisitions, including HipChat, a product he ran for 2 years post acquisition. Prior to Atlassian, he held other go-to-market roles with leading Silicon Valley software companies.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Marketing and Executive
- Technology Executive
Judith Sim has over 30 years of marketing and executive leadership experience. During Judith's tenure at Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), one of the largest global software providers known for database management systems, she served as Chief of Staff to the Office of the CEO and was Chief Marketing Officer from 2005 through 2020. Judith was responsible for global marketing, customer programs, sports marketing, brand and media communications for more than 15 years. She is currently on the Board of Directors at Fortinet Inc. (NASDAQ: FTNT), a provider of cybersecurity solutions, as the Chair of the Human Resources Committee and a member of the Corporate Governance and ESG Committees. She is also on the Board of Directors at First Advantage, a global provider of technology solutions for screening, verifications, safety and compliance related to human capital, as the Chair of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee and a member of Audit Committee. Judith was also a member of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce from 2015 to 2020. She earned a B.S. from the University of California Davis.
Job Titles:
- Chief Financial Officer
- Member of the Board of Directors
Kelly Bodnar Battles has over 30 years of finance and strategy leadership experience including serving as CFO at Alpha Medical, Quora, Bracket Computing and Host Analytics, Vice President of Finance at IronPort Systems, Chief of Staff to the CFO of Cisco Systems, and Director of Strategy and Corporate Development at Hewlett Packard. Kelly also worked as an Associate at both McKinsey and J.P. Morgan. Kelly is currently on the Board and Audit Committees of Arista (NYSE: ANET), Genesys, Clari and Alpha Medical, and has also served on the Board and Audit Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation (owner of Wikipedia.org) in the past. Kelly holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, both with honors.
Mala Tejwani has spent the last decade in tech. Prior to joining DataStax, Mala was leading strategy and operations for Google Cloud Platform, Cloud Artificial Intelligence. She spent 8.5 years at Google in a variety of roles. Prior to Google, Mala worked at NBCUniversal and Universal Pictures within their Business Development function, as well as, University Programs. Mala took some time in between where she was a performer in Cirque du Soleil and a choreographer on So You Think You Can Dance. She received her B.A. in History and Political Science from UCLA.
Paul Madera - Founder, Managing Director
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder
- Managing Director
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Managing Director of Meritech Capital Partners
Paul Madera is a Managing Director of Meritech Capital Partners, a $3 Billion late stage venture capital firm that seeks to invest in emerging category leaders in technology and in medical devices.
Paul co-founded Meritech Capital in 1999 with two partners and he currently serves on the boards of Filevine, ForgeRock, Icertis, and Sonendo. He previously led Meritech investments into Facebook, Glaukos, Mulesoft, Nextdoor, Salesforce, Yammer and several others.
Prior to founding Meritech, Paul was an investment banker with Montgomery Securities and with Morgan Stanley. He previously served in the US Air Force as an F-4 and F-16 pilot while based in South Korea, Spain and Utah.
Paul has a BS from the USAF Academy and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He continues to serve on the USAF Academy Endowment Board of Directors.
Job Titles:
- Managing Partner
- Member of the Board of Directors
Shankar Ramaswamy has spent over 25 years in engineering, building scalable and mission-critical user, business, and technology platforms at companies like Google, Apigee, Paypal, eBay, AWS, IBM, THBS, and Transarc. Shankar has received several academic and professional awards and has authored numerous research papers and patents. He received a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.