
At 12, Christopher Matarese and Sal Sferlazza pooled their money for a strategy board game. Four decades and several exits later, the same partnership controls a profitable IT company valued at $12.3 billion.

The mechanical engineer turned marketer left Adaptiva, learned the machinery of global alliances, then returned to explain a quiet technology problem with enormous consequences.
Justin Talerico is the CEO of Automox, a Boulder, Colorado company building cloud-native autonomous endpoint management software. He stepped into the top job in May 2025 after four years as the company's chief marketing officer, a stretch in which he helped quadruple growth. A lifelong builder who started coding at age nine, Talerico co-founded the interactive content platform ion interactive in 2007 and sold it to ScribbleLive in 2017, and later held leadership roles at Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru. He and his wife Anna run Beacon9, a SaaS best-practices advisory.
Sal Sferlazza is the co-founder and CEO of NinjaOne, the Austin-based IT and endpoint management platform valued at $12.3 billion in June 2026. A serial entrepreneur, he built and sold four previous companies (Realm Interactive, Lasso Logic, PacketTrap, Anchor) before launching what was originally NinjaRMM in 2013 with his childhood-camp friend Chris Matarese. NinjaOne is profitable, debt-free, and still majority-controlled by its founders.
Dan Streetman is the CEO and Board Member of Tanium, the enterprise cybersecurity and autonomous endpoint management company. A West Point graduate, Harvard MBA, and Bronze Star-decorated Army Ranger, Streetman brings military-grade discipline to enterprise security — leading Tanium's push into AI-powered autonomous IT operations for the world's largest organizations. Before Tanium, he drove double-digit growth as CEO at TIBCO Software and Allvue Systems, and held senior leadership at BMC Software, Salesforce, and C3.ai.