cloud-networking
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Hiro Notaney Makes Invisible Infrastructure Make Sense
After a career spanning airlines, optical networks, connected devices, contracts and cloud infrastructure, Alkira CMO Hiro Notaney has kept one idea in his carry-on: trust is the only marketing asset that compounds.
The Khan Brothers Sold the Network Once. Then They Rebuilt It for the Cloud.
Alkira turned the least cloud-like part of cloud computing - the network - into an on-demand service. Eight years, $176 million in funding and one $475 million acquisition later, its biggest test is whether software and fiber can finally behave like one product.
Inseego Sold the Fleet Business to Save the Hotspot - Now It Wants to Run the Wireless Edge
The company behind MiFi escaped a debt squeeze by selling telematics for $52.7 million and narrowing its bet to 5G hardware plus cloud software. The turnaround offers a practical lesson in focus - and a warning about betting too heavily on a few giant carriers.
Alex Feiszli Bet His Career on the Internet's Most Boring Problem
He left IBM to make far-flung machines behave like neighbors. Five years, one YC batch, and a great many WireGuard tunnels later, Alex Feiszli is still turning network plumbing into a product people can actually operate.
Monica Kumar and the Power of the Career Maze
She began as the only woman in a mechanical-engineering class of 80. Today, the Extreme Networks CMO argues that careers are mazes, technology is a means to an end, and empathy belongs at the center of leadership.
Arrcus, Inc.
Arrcus wants the network to stop arriving as a sealed appliance. Its software runs across white-box switches, clouds and edge sites - and now the company is betting that AI will make that freedom more valuable.
Netmaker
Netmaker is an open-source virtual networking platform built on WireGuard that automates fast, secure, distributed mesh networks across clouds, data centers, edge sites, and devices. Founded by former IBM cloud engineers Alex Feiszli and Dillon Carns, it lets teams stitch together servers, containers, IoT devices, and remote users into a single flat, encrypted network - a kind of VPC for distributed systems. A YC W22 company, Netmaker pairs a widely adopted open-source project with paid Professional and Enterprise editions aimed at businesses and managed service providers.
Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks is a Nasdaq-listed enterprise networking company that designs wired and wireless infrastructure - switches, Wi-Fi access points and SD-WAN - and pairs it with cloud-managed, AI-driven software. Built around ExtremeCloud IQ and the newer Extreme Platform ONE, the company delivers cloud and increasingly AI-native networking to more than 50,000 customers worldwide, from NFL stadiums and hospitals to schools, factories and retailers. Headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina, it competes with Cisco, HPE Aruba, Juniper and Arista by pitching a single, simpler platform that unifies networking, security and analytics.
Peyman Kazemian
Peyman Kazemian is the co-founder of Forward Networks, a Santa Clara-based enterprise software company that builds mathematically accurate digital twins of complex networks. His PhD dissertation at Stanford - which became the foundational Header Space Analysis framework - won the NSDI 2024 Test-of-Time Award and directly spawned a company now trusted by Fortune 50 enterprises and U.S. government agencies. A graduate of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and Stanford's electrical engineering department under Prof. Nick McKeown, Kazemian helped develop OpenFlow and SDN before turning his research into a business that has raised over $140 million to transform how enterprises understand, secure, and manage their networks.
Jerry Kennelly
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
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 Erickson
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.