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 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.
Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the firm's infrastructure practice. A Spanish-born computer scientist and entrepreneur, he pioneered software-defined networking (SDN) by inventing the OpenFlow protocol during his Stanford PhD. He co-founded Nicira Networks, which VMware acquired for $1.26 billion in 2012, where he then scaled the networking and security business to $600 million in annual revenue. An ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award winner, Casado now invests in cutting-edge infrastructure and AI companies, serving on boards of over a dozen startups while shaping the future of enterprise technology and AI regulation policy.