Web Augustine is the founder and CEO of HiWire, a Menlo Park outfit that runs high-end executive search and fundraising help for early-stage startups at entrepreneur-friendly terms. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer turned marketer, he was the first product manager on HP's DeskJet inkjet line, Sun Microsystems' employee 152, and the founding VP of marketing who helped spin VeriSign out as a standalone company in 1995. Four decades in, he splits his time between recruiting CEOs and VPs for founders, advising on pitch decks and financial forecasts, and writing books - including a 2020 political satire and a 1,400-entry quotations collection.
Chris Babel is the Chief Executive Officer of Arcserve, an Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based data protection and cyber resilience company serving over 235,000 customers worldwide. With more than two decades navigating the intersection of security, privacy, and enterprise technology, Babel brought a rare cross-disciplinary resume to Arcserve in May 2024: he led TrustArc as CEO for over a decade, transforming a browser-padlock certification company into a global privacy compliance platform, and before that spent years at VeriSign running authentication services across 150-plus countries. His mandate at Arcserve is to rebuild partner trust, simplify a sprawling product catalog, and position the company as the go-to data resilience solution for SMBs and mid-market enterprises facing relentless ransomware threats.