data-management
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Ravi Shankar Made a Career of Moving Less Data - and More Minds
He began as a software developer, learned to sell an idea without sanding off its technical edges, and has spent more than a decade making a contrarian case for leaving enterprise data where it lives.
Masayoshi Nakano Has Spent 30 Years Teaching New Technology to Speak Human
From SharePoint to Watson to cloud data, Masayoshi Nakano has built a career around a deceptively difficult job: making the next wave of enterprise technology legible before it becomes ordinary.
Carl Madaffari Learned the Database, Then Learned to Tell Its Story
After two decades inside Epsilon's data machinery, Carl Madaffari took a breath, changed lanes, and found a second act translating complex products into plain business value.
Fran Wilson Has a Map for Marketing’s Messiest Rooms
After helping Red Hat grow from its startup years to IBM’s $34 billion acquisition, Fran Wilson built a practical creed for enterprise marketing: share the map, choose fewer bets, and let trustworthy data settle the arguments.
Jason Eiswerth
Jason Eiswerth is the CEO of Canoe Intelligence, a New York-based financial technology company that uses machine learning to ingest, categorize, extract, and validate alternative investment documents and data for more than 400 investment firms. A technology entrepreneur with more than 20 years of senior management experience, he took the helm in 2020 and has since guided Canoe through multiple funding rounds, including a $36 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs in 2024, while positioning the company as core infrastructure for the alternatives industry.
Michael Pusateri
Michael Pusateri is the CEO and founder of Siepe, a Dallas-based fintech he started in 2012 after a career running technology inside hedge funds. Siepe builds software and managed services for CLO managers, private credit funds, and other alternative investment firms, and closed a $30 million Series B led by WestCap in August 2024. Before Siepe, Pusateri was CTO at Carlson Capital and CTO/co-COO at Highland Capital Management.
Reed Overfelt
Reed Overfelt is the Chief Executive Officer of Black Tiger, an AI-powered master data management and governance platform. He is a career enterprise-software operator with roots at Microsoft, later leading growth at Aurea Software, running Redwood Software as Group CEO, and steering ventures including FEV Tutor and GAN Integrity. He argues, publicly and often, that master data is the foundation of enterprise AI.
Jessvin Thomas
Jessvin Thomas is the CEO of Auguria, a cybersecurity startup building what it calls the first SIEM designed from the ground up for AI - a 'Security Knowledge Layer' that curates the flood of security logs before analysts ever see them. A Cornell-trained operations researcher who started his career hand-inspecting firewall logs during the dot-com boom, he has spent two decades across Nokia, Blackstone, Optiv, SKOUT/Barracuda, and Adlumin. He is also a Venture Partner at SYN Ventures and, in a twist, the owner of Tenn Street Coffee & Books in Denver.
Jitesh Ghai
Jitesh S. Ghai is the President and CEO of Hyland, the Thoma Bravo-owned content services and intelligent automation company based in Westlake, Ohio. A University of Waterloo electrical engineer who began his career building hardware, Ghai spent 14 years at Informatica reshaping it into a cloud and AI leader before stepping into Hyland's top job in May 2024 to push the firm deeper into agentic AI and unstructured content.
Ali Amin-Javaheri
Ali Amin-Javaheri is the co-founder and CEO of Knowde, the B2B digital marketplace and data platform transforming how the $5 trillion global chemicals industry does business online. With 11 years of experience at ChemPoint - where he helped scale the chemical distribution startup to over $400M in revenue - Ali built Knowde from a PowerPoint vision into a platform hosting 8,000+ supplier storefronts and 230,000+ chemical products. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, and Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher's fund), Knowde has raised $180.8M total, including a $60M Series C in August 2024. Ali's drive is deeply personal: his father Mehdi fled Iran in 1985 and struggled to find work commensurate with his chemical engineering degree, and Ali grew up reading chemistry trade magazines, determined to modernize an industry built on relationships and paper catalogs.
Angel Vina
Dr. Angel Vina is the Founder and CEO of Denodo Technologies, the global leader in data virtualization and data management platforms. A former academic who spent 25 years as a university professor at institutions including the Technical University of Madrid and the University of A Coruña - with postdoctoral research stints at UCLA and Stanford - Vina founded Denodo in Spain in 1999 after asking a deceptively simple question: how can we set data free? Today Denodo operates in 25 offices across 20 countries, has secured $336 million in Series B funding from TPG, and has been named a Gartner Leader in Data Integration Tools for five consecutive years. Vina's academic obsession with real-time distributed data systems became a commercial category - and a company that turned 25 in 2025.
Clint Sharp
Clint Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cribl, a data infrastructure company valued at $3.5 billion that helps Fortune 500 enterprises route, filter, and control their telemetry data at scale. Before building Cribl, he spent five years as Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, where he and his co-founders identified the problem that would become Cribl's founding mission: data volumes were exploding, budgets were not, and enterprises needed a vendor-agnostic way to manage what goes where. Under Sharp's leadership, Cribl grew from a 2017 idea to more than $200M in ARR, serving 43 Fortune 100 companies - all while he also briefly served as interim Chief Revenue Officer during a pivotal growth moment.
Chris Wilson
Chris Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Grasp Technologies, a Dublin, Ohio-based company that has been the backbone of travel data management for corporate programs and travel management companies since 1996. He brought 28+ years of enterprise software sales and leadership experience to the role when he joined in June 2024, having previously scaled revenue at Hazelcast (six years as CRO) and PSPDFKit (two years as CRO), and earlier built high-performing sales teams at Oracle, Skytree, and Magnet Systems. Based in Los Altos, California, Wilson is known for his go-to-market expertise and his vision for Grasp as a platform at the intersection of travel data consolidation, virtual payments, and AI-ready analytics.
Jeb Miller
Jeb Miller is a General Partner at Icon Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage venture capital firm. With over 25 years of experience in technology investing, he has backed more than 50 startups across AI, cybersecurity, digital health, and enterprise SaaS. Before Icon Ventures, he built corporate venture programs at Morgan Stanley Technology Ventures, held principal roles at Worldview Technology Partners and ComVentures, and consulted for the US Department of Defense's Rapid Reaction Technology Office. He holds a BA in Economics from Harvard College (graduated summa cum laude) and was a collegiate water polo athlete. His portfolio includes notable exits like FireEye (IPO), MoPub (acquired by Twitter), and Quizlet, with Icon Ventures tracking 22+ exits representing over $21 billion in combined market value.
Preeti Rathi
Preeti Rathi is a General Partner at Icon Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm, where she leads investments in enterprise AI, digital health, and cybersecurity. With a rare blend of 8 years of engineering and product management experience at Cisco (where she helped build $1B+ revenue products like the ASR 9000 Series) and 14+ years in venture capital, she brings operator-grade conviction to every investment thesis. Her portfolio spans category-defining companies like Rockset (acquired by OpenAI), Aisera, Alation, At-Bay, and Simbian, and she is a committed member of All Raise, championing diversity in venture.
George Kurian
George Kurian is the Chief Executive Officer of NetApp, the $20B+ enterprise data storage and cloud infrastructure company, where he has led a decade-long transformation from legacy storage vendor to AI-ready data platform. Born in Pampady, Kerala, he arrived at Princeton at 17 with a partial scholarship and a twin brother — Thomas Kurian, now CEO of Google Cloud — making them one of the rarest pairs in tech: identical twins who both run major Fortune 500 companies. Under his tenure since 2015, NetApp has posted record revenues of $6.57B in FY2025 and positioned itself as critical backbone for enterprise AI workloads.
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.
Ed King
Ed King is the Founder and CEO of Openprise, a RevOps data automation platform headquartered in San Mateo, California. A mechanical engineer by training with an MBA from UC Berkeley, Ed spent over a decade in enterprise middleware and product management roles at IBM, Oracle, Qualys, and Axway before founding Openprise in 2013. He built the company to solve the data chaos he witnessed firsthand in go-to-market operations — enabling non-technical RevOps teams to automate complex data workflows without writing a single line of code. Under his leadership, Openprise has raised $57.93M in total funding, including a $25M Series B led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital in March 2024, and has been recognized as an Inc. Magazine Best Workplace three consecutive years.
Omar Tawakol
Omar Tawakol is a serial entrepreneur and AI advertising pioneer who turned audience data, voice AI, and now spatially-aware AI into three consecutive company exits. He founded BlueKai (acquired by Oracle for $400M+), Voicea (acquired by Cisco), and currently leads Rembrand, an AI-powered virtual product placement platform that embeds brands invisibly into video content. He holds board seats at The Trade Desk and LiveRamp, and in 2025 merged Rembrand with Spaceback to build an AI-powered ad factory that reaches across CTV, digital video, and display.
Ali Mannan Tirmizi
Ali Mannan Tirmizi is a Pakistani IT leader and engineer who went from co-founding a Harvard-backed water filtration startup at 23 to becoming a Senior IT Manager at Procter & Gamble, where he leads supply chain cloud platforms across Asia, Middle East and Africa. With a background in Electrical Engineering from LUMS and comparative public policy from UMass Amherst (US State Department SUSI program), he bridges technical depth with social purpose - slashing $220K in cloud costs at P&G while previously building a $2 water filter that removes 99.99% of bacteria for Pakistan's underserved communities. He also writes on data management for DATAVERSITY and holds a YouTube channel where he shares insights from his journey.
Nick Bonfiglio
Nick Bonfiglio is the CEO and Co-Founder of Syncari, a platform pioneering Agentic Master Data Management for enterprise AI initiatives. With 28+ years in enterprise software, he shaped product strategy at Marketo (acquired by Adobe) as EVP of Global Product, co-founded Aptrinsic (acquired by Gainsight as Gainsight PX), and now leads Syncari through a $45M total funding journey to help Fortune 1000 companies build trusted, AI-ready data foundations. A co-author of 'Mastering Product Experience in SaaS,' Nick has been a driving force behind emerging enterprise disciplines like RevOps, Marketing Ops, and Customer Success Ops.