network-automation
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Kristen Rachels Has a Rule for the AI Era: Own the Number
The Itential CMO spent two decades translating complex enterprise software into a reason to care. Now she is rebuilding marketing around agents, accountability, and a stubbornly human appetite for curiosity.
Miguel Alonso Has Spent 30 Years Making Networks Less Stubborn
From broadband line cards to AI-assisted operations and open network software, Miguel Alonso’s career follows a quiet idea: infrastructure improves when operators gain more choice.
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.
Abilash Menon Wants the Internet's Middle to Stop Using Spreadsheets
After two decades of making packets behave, the MaiaEdge co-founder is tackling telecom's awkward handoff: the place where automation ends, spreadsheets begin, and every network insists on being an island.
Ben Edmond Put the Telecom Industry’s Spreadsheets on Notice
At 41, with two sons and a comfortable telecom career, Ben Edmond traded a salary for a stubborn idea: the internet’s commercial plumbing should run on location truth, not emailed spreadsheets. A decade later, Connectbase is still pursuing the same thesis - only the map has become much larger.
Roger Dewey Put the Tiny SIM Card in Charge
For decades, telecom treated the SIM as a passport. Roger Dewey saw a pocket-sized computer - and built a company around letting it make decisions.
Vishal Shukla
Vishal Shukla is the co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks, a San Jose-based company building an AI-first, vendor-agnostic networking platform on top of the open-source SONiC operating system. A networking veteran with more than 20 years of experience, he previously held leadership roles at Cisco, IBM, Mellanox (NVIDIA), and Nortel. He holds 25-plus granted patents, has authored books on SDN, OpenFlow and OpenStack, and wrote 'Deciding the Future: Building New Networks for the AI Era.' Under his leadership Aviz raised a $17M Series A in November 2024 (roughly $31M total), backed by investors including Cisco Investments and Qualcomm Ventures.
Kris Beevers
Kris Beevers is the co-founder and CEO of NetBox Labs, the commercial steward of the open-source NetBox platform that has become a default system of record for network and infrastructure teams. An engineer with a Ph.D. in computer science from RPI, he previously co-founded and led NS1, the DNS and application-delivery company acquired by IBM in 2023. NetBox Labs raised a $35M Series B in July 2025, bringing total funding to $55M, and serves tens of thousands of organizations including hyperscalers, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies as AI drives surging demand for infrastructure.
Pavel Bykov
Pavel Bykov is co-founder and CEO of IP Fabric, a network assurance platform he started in 2015 after fifteen years inside the plumbing of Fortune 500 networks. IP Fabric builds an automated digital twin of an enterprise network so operators can see, query and validate what is actually running - customers include Red Hat, Major League Baseball and Air France. The company raised a $25M Series B in June 2023 and is based in Prague with a US office in Boston.
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.
Ed Meyercord
Ed Meyercord is President, CEO, and Director of Extreme Networks (NASDAQ: EXTR), a publicly traded enterprise networking company with 2,700 employees and over $1.1 billion in annual revenue. He took the helm in April 2015 after serving as Chairman of the board since 2011, steering Extreme from a hardware-centric also-ran into a cloud-managed, AI-native networking platform. Under his watch the company now powers the wireless networks at Old Trafford, the Burj Khalifa, Taylor Swift concert tours, and Samsung's global operations, while its SaaS ARR has grown dramatically. Before Extreme, Meyercord ran Talk America (a publicly traded telco), Cavalier Telephone, and Critical Alert Systems, after starting his career as an investment banking VP at Salomon Brothers. He is also known for bringing improv comedy principles into corporate leadership and for his advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities through SKIT Programs.
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.