Jerry M. Kennelly co-founded Riverbed Technology in 2002 and spent 16 years building it from a two-person startup into a billion-dollar enterprise serving 30,000 customers across every Forbes Global 100 company. A finance executive turned visionary operator, Kennelly combined rigorous business discipline with Silicon Valley boldness - taking Riverbed public on NASDAQ in 2006, engineering nine acquisitions, and watching its market cap peak near $6 billion in 2011. After retiring from Riverbed in April 2018, he became Chairman and CEO of Scandic Capital LLC and joined the board of cybersecurity firm Tenable.
Michael Reid is the CEO and Executive Director of Megaport, a global Network-as-a-Service platform operating across roughly 1,000 data centers in 26 countries. A Brisbane-born aerospace engineer turned tech sales leader, Reid spent 15 years at Cisco - most recently as CRO of ThousandEyes, where he grew ARR by 2.4x and scaled the team from 150 to nearly 400 people. Since taking Megaport's helm in May 2023, he has led the company to its first-ever profit after tax (FY24), grown Customer Lifetime Value 50% year-on-year to $2.1 billion, and repositioned Megaport as the backbone for AI-era enterprise connectivity.
David Sterling Erickson is the CEO and co-founder of Forward Networks, a Santa Clara-based company that pioneered the network digital twin. A Stanford PhD in Computer Science and one of the original architects of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Erickson co-founded Forward Networks in 2013 with three fellow Stanford PhD graduates to give enterprises mathematically accurate, real-time models of their networks - enabling visibility, compliance verification, and security posture management across complex multi-vendor environments. Under his leadership, Forward Networks has raised over $140M in funding, achieved 139% ARR growth, and serves marquee customers including Goldman Sachs, PayPal, and Telstra.