cloud-storage
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Ashraf Alkarmi and the art of choosing five things
Before becoming Dropbox's co-CEO, Ashraf Alkarmi spent years making video easier to create, find and use. His next assignment begins with a familiar discipline: deciding what deserves attention.
Ovais Tariq and the art of making storage uneventful
After nearly six years building storage at Uber, Ovais Tariq co-founded Tigris Data. His next challenge is to make global storage feel simple, even when the work underneath reaches all the way down to the hardware.
Matthew Dornquast and the things worth keeping
A daughter’s digital photographs helped set Matthew Dornquast on the path to CrashPlan. His other lasting project was a technology community that could keep building without him.
Dani Golan and the Art of Changing Course
A former fighter pilot built a storage company, handed off the hardware, and followed the data into the cloud. At Silk, Dani Golan is making another turn - toward the information that AI needs to do useful work.
Randy Chou and the trouble with distance
At Panzura, Randy Chou worked to make distant offices share files as if they were next door. At Nubeva, the former storage CEO is working on a different obstacle: getting usable data back from encryption.
Don MacAskill and the rival worth keeping
He built SmugMug by charging for photographs when free was fashionable. Then he bought Flickr, a competitor he had been defending for years, and took on the harder business of keeping a community alive.
Bin Fan Has Spent a Career Shortening the Distance Between Data and Work
Before AI teams worried about feeding GPUs, Bin Fan was making key-value systems waste fewer bytes. His career follows one stubborn question across two technological eras: how do you keep expensive machines from waiting on data?
Mahesh Patel and the Accountant’s Instinct for the Sale
He studied law, mastered the finance function, and kept drifting toward the customer. At MinIO, Mahesh Patel's useful contradiction - the CFO who envies the salesperson - has become the job.
Peter Haendler and the Fine Art of Making Failure Brief
A career that began close to the help desk now sits inside a stubborn question in computing: when systems fail, how much work disappears - and how quickly can people begin again?
Tim Craycroft
Tim Craycroft is a veteran technology executive who spent over two decades building the plumbing behind digital advertising. After 14 years at Amazon - where he helped architect their multi-billion dollar ads business and opened the Boulder ad tech office - he joined Google in 2020 as VP & GM of Google Advertising, overseeing YouTube, apps, and display ads. In September 2025, he took center stage at the Google ad tech antitrust remedies trial, testifying about internal analyses (Project Sunday and Project Monday) that explored divesting AdX and DFP. He's now joined Flywheel as Senior VP of Engineering. An early cloud storage pioneer who co-founded i-drive.com in the late 1990s, Craycroft brings Dartmouth computer science roots and a Boulder, Colorado sensibility - equal parts algorithm and altitude.
Peter Thompson
Peter Thompson is the Cofounder and CEO of LucidLink, a San Francisco-based cloud-native file streaming platform that turns object storage into a native file system accessible from anywhere in real time. A Minnesota farm kid who spent 15 years navigating storage markets across Asia and the Americas at DataCore Software before returning to Stanford's GSB at age 48, Thompson teamed up with engineer George Dochev in 2016 to build what users still describe as 'magic.' LucidLink has since raised $120.6M in total funding including a $75M Series C led by Brighton Park Capital in 2023, grown ARR nearly 5x in two years, counts Warner Bros., Paramount, Adobe, and Shopify among its customers, and earned an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award from the Television Academy.
Ronen Schwartz
Ronen Schwartz is the CEO of K2view, an Israeli-founded data product company at the forefront of enterprise AI readiness. With 25 years in the data industry — including a 14-year run at Informatica and a stint at NetApp where he grew the cloud storage business 12-fold to dominate a $600M division — Schwartz took the helm at K2view in December 2023. He is focused on turning fragmented enterprise data into live, governed data products that power agentic AI applications at scale, positioning K2view as the infrastructure layer that makes real-time AI not just possible, but production-ready.
Drew Houston
Drew Houston is the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, the cloud storage and productivity company he built from a bus-ride frustration in 2006 into a NASDAQ-listed business with over 700 million registered users and ~$2.5B in annual revenue. A MIT computer science graduate who started coding at age 5, Houston famously turned down a ~$250M acquisition offer from Steve Jobs in 2009 and has spent nearly two decades transforming Dropbox from a file-sync tool into an AI-powered universal workspace. In 2024, he and his wife Erin signed The Giving Pledge, committing the majority of their ~$2.4B fortune to education and entrepreneurship causes.