Steve Corndell
He did not found env0. He did not write its code. He arrived as the chief operating officer in January 2024, and sixteen months later the board handed him the whole company. The resume behind that decision is a straight line: one salesman, one ladder, a decade of never skipping a rung.
A salesman is running the developer-tools company
The tidy version of a startup CEO's biography usually starts with a garage or a dropped-out degree or a founding insight scribbled on a napkin. Steve Corndell's starts with a channel-manager job at a Boston cloud company called VMTurbo in 2012, and it is worth pausing on that, because the company he now runs sells software to engineers and Corndell's degree, from Bryant University, is in management and marketing. He is the sales guy. He is in charge.
env0 makes an infrastructure-as-code management platform, which is the sort of product where the buyer is a platform engineer and the demo involves Terraform and drift detection and policy-as-code guardrails. It is not obvious that the right person to lead such a company is someone whose career was built on quota, pipeline, and the unglamorous mechanics of getting enterprises to sign. And yet in May 2025 env0's board decided, unanimously, that it was.
The decision reads less strangely once you look at where Corndell came from. He spent roughly a decade at the company that became Turbonomic, arriving as a Senior Channel Manager and leaving after IBM bought it for two billion dollars in 2021. In between he was a Regional VP of Sales, a Senior VP of Sales, and the General Manager and VP of Commercial Sales for North America, before becoming Chief Revenue Officer. That is not a career of leaps. It is a career of rungs, climbed one at a time, at essentially one company.
The through-line is that Corndell knows how to sell cloud infrastructure to large enterprises, which is precisely the thing env0 needs to do next. The company is small - 34 employees by the data available - and its ambitions are not. Corndell talks about env0 serving "a rapidly growing number of the Fortune 500 and Cloud 100." Closing that gap between headcount and customer roster is, more or less, the entire job description.
What makes the handoff notable is how quiet it was. Co-founder Ohad Maislish did not get pushed out in a boardroom drama; he moved to the board of directors and let the operator take the wheel. Founders resisting exactly this transition have sunk plenty of companies. Maislish did the harder, less dramatic thing and stepped aside for someone whose whole skill set is the part of company-building he was ready to hand off.
Corndell's own framing of env0's value is refreshingly free of moonshot language. Enterprises, he says, "need a trusted partner to help them move fast, stay secure, and operate with full visibility." Move fast, stay secure, see everything. Those are three things every infrastructure team worries about at 3 a.m., stated plainly by a man who has spent his career listening to buyers describe exactly those worries.
"As organizations scale their increasingly complex, heterogenous infrastructure, they need a trusted partner to help them move fast, stay secure, and operate with full visibility."
The ledger
One ladder, no skipped rungs
How he thinks about the work
The multiplying effect
Back at Turbonomic, Corndell described his job not as closing deals but as building the people who would close the next thousand. He wanted tenured salespeople passing their knowledge down, creating what he called a multiplying effect - leaders producing leaders.
- Chemistry over experience when hiring for young technical teams
- Systematic pipeline inspections, transparent metrics, nowhere to hide
- A "both-and" principle instead of forced tradeoffs
- A "velocity framework" for scaling deal sizes over time
The new bench at env0
Taking the CEO seat, Corndell did what operators do: he assembled a team. The env0 leadership lineup he unveiled leans enterprise, spanning both Boston go-to-market and the Tel Aviv R&D center.
- David Kopans — Chief Financial Officer
- Chris Graham — Chief Marketing Officer
- Yaron Yarimi — VP of R&D, Head of Tel Aviv Center
- Maya Aquadro — VP of Customer Success
- Luis da Silva Rodrigues — VP of Sales
Zero to a $2B acquisition
Corndell has talked publicly about the Turbonomic run and about the rarer arc of going from individual contributor to the corner office. His conversation on Tech Sales Insights LIVE walks through the road to the IBM acquisition.
Things that stick
What he is chasing
The goal, stated in the flat language Corndell prefers, is to make env0 the default place large cloud teams manage their infrastructure-as-code. That means deepening the company's footprint among the Fortune 500 and the Cloud 100, growing revenue, and doing it with a headcount that today would not fill a mid-sized restaurant.
It is a bet on repeatability. Corndell has already watched a Boston cloud company go from ambitious startup to two-billion-dollar acquisition, and much of what he brings to env0 is the muscle memory of that climb - the pipeline discipline, the hiring instincts, the belief that a salesperson's real product is the next generation of salespeople. Whether env0's ending rhymes with Turbonomic's is the open question. The board has already placed its wager on the man who has done it before.