Manu Bansal is co-founder and CEO of Lightup, an AI-powered data quality and observability platform for the enterprise data stack. A Stanford EE PhD and IIT Kanpur alum, he first co-founded Uhana, a machine-learning analytics company for mobile carriers that VMware acquired in 2019. The grind of debugging bad data at Uhana became the seed for Lightup, which now runs hundreds of thousands of daily data-quality checks across petabytes of customer data and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
Rajen Sheth is the CEO and co-founder of Kyron Learning, a public benefit company using AI to give every student access to high-quality one-on-one teaching. Before founding Kyron, he spent 17 years at Google, where he was the original product manager behind Google Apps (now Workspace), launched Chromebooks for Education, and rose to Vice President of Google Cloud AI and Industry Solutions. A Stanford-trained engineer who once pitched enterprise Gmail to Eric Schmidt and got turned down, he has built tools used by millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of students, then walked away from big tech to chase a teacher-shaped problem he has carried since sixth grade.
AJ Herrera is the VP of Corporate Marketing at Cloudflare, where he leads the brand narrative that recast a CDN company into the world's connectivity cloud. With over 30 years in high-tech marketing spanning Silicon Graphics, a decade running his own agency, and seven years shaping VMware's global brand, he brings both the craftsman's instinct and the operator's eye to one of the internet's most consequential infrastructure companies.
Scott Bajtos is the Global Vice President of Adobe Customer Solutions — spanning Customer Engineering, Customer Success, and Professional Services for Adobe Experience Cloud. With over 30 years in enterprise software, he has served as Chief Customer Officer at both VMware and FinancialForce, and built customer advocacy programs at SAP, Business Objects, Marimba, and Cadence Design Systems. His philosophy is simple: helping every customer succeed and become a customer for life.
Hatem Naguib is a cybersecurity operator who spent a decade at Barracuda Networks, the last four years as CEO, steering its shift into a platform-based, recurring-revenue security company. Before Barracuda he helped scale VMware's NSX networking and security business past $600M. He stepped down from Barracuda in September 2025 and joined Corelight's board of directors in May 2026.
Karthik Rau is the CEO of Contentful, the Berlin-based composable content platform. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer, he founded the cloud-monitoring company SignalFx (acquired by Splunk for $1.05B in 2019) and earlier helped lead VMware through its 2007 IPO. He took the helm at Contentful in April 2024 to push it from headless CMS into an AI-era content platform.
Rajiv Ramaswami is the President and CEO of Nutanix, the San Jose-based hybrid multicloud software company. An optical networking PhD who built a 30-year career at IBM Research, Nortel, Cisco, Broadcom and VMware before taking the top job at Nutanix in December 2020, he holds 36 patents and is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Sanjay Poonen is the CEO and President of Cohesity, the data security and management company that absorbed Veritas' enterprise backup business in late 2024 to become the largest data protection vendor in the world. A Dartmouth-Stanford-Harvard alumnus who arrived in Boston at 18 with fifty dollars, he previously helped double revenues at both SAP (from ~$10B to ~$20B) and VMware (from ~$6B to ~$12B), where as COO he architected the landmark VMware-AWS partnership and the AirWatch acquisition.
ControlUp is a digital employee experience (DEX) and autonomous endpoint management platform that helps IT teams see, score, and fix problems on every desktop, virtual session, and SaaS app before users start filing tickets. Born in Israel in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, it serves more than 2,000 enterprise customers and was named a Leader in the inaugural 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DEX Tools.
Asaf Ganot is the co-founder of ControlUp, the company that pioneered the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management category. He spent a decade as CEO building ControlUp from an Israeli VDI monitoring tool into a global enterprise software leader backed by $141M in funding, before transitioning to Executive Chairman and CEO of ControlUp Labs in 2023 to focus on product vision and innovation.
Milin Desai is the CEO of Sentry, the developer-first error monitoring and application performance platform trusted by over 4 million developers and 100,000+ organizations. A computer engineer by training with a master's from USC, Desai spent nearly a decade at VMware scaling the NSX network virtualization product line into a billion-dollar business before joining Sentry in January 2020. Under his leadership, Sentry raised a $90 million Series E in 2022 (total funding $219.75M), achieved unicorn status at a $3B+ valuation, surpassed $100M ARR, and grew to process 790+ billion events per month - all while staying true to its open-source, developer-first ethos and charging one-third of what competitors ask.
Jaypal Sethi is a General Partner on the Venture team at Tribe Capital, the data-driven Silicon Valley VC firm managing over $2.2 billion in assets. With more than 20 years in enterprise technology spanning VMware, MongoDB, Google, and Orbitera (acquired by Google), Sethi brings operator-grade pattern recognition to enterprise software investments. He sits on the boards of JupiterOne, Aether, and Tranzact, and serves as a board observer at Docker, Instabase, and LinearB.
Bryan Gobbett is the Chief Executive Officer of RackWare, a San Jose-based multi-cloud mobility and resiliency platform that has migrated over one million workloads across 60+ countries. With nearly two decades of engineering leadership at companies including Cisco, Ericsson, Dell, and Gigamon, Gobbett brings deep technical credibility to a company quietly becoming essential infrastructure for enterprises navigating hybrid and multi-cloud complexity. Under his leadership, RackWare grew revenue 74.5% to $10.5M ARR in 2024 and secured preferred license partnerships with Oracle, IBM, and Google Cloud.
Sumit Dhawan is the CEO of Proofpoint, a leading cybersecurity company protecting over 85 Fortune 100 companies with $2B+ in ARR. With 25+ years building enterprise software businesses at Citrix, Instart, and VMware (where he drove $13B in revenue as President), Dhawan joined Proofpoint in November 2023 with a mandate to unify human-centric security and grow toward $5B ARR by 2030. He is known for championing the idea that 95% of cybersecurity failures trace to human error - and that defending people is the only real way to defend organizations.
Joshua Barrow is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Skillcentrix, the only consultancy 100% focused on Workday customers' entire talent lifecycle. With a Harvard CS background and 25+ years building and selling tech companies - from Breakaway Solutions' 1999 IPO to selling Third Sky to VMware in 2014 - he now sits at the intersection of HR strategy and enterprise software, helping healthcare organizations make skills data safety-critical rather than just strategic.
Poojan Kumar is a serial entrepreneur and cloud infrastructure pioneer who co-founded Clumio, a cloud-native backup-as-a-service company that raised $261M before being acquired by Commvault in September 2024. A Stanford-educated IIT Bombay alumnus, Kumar previously co-founded PernixData (acquired by Nutanix in 2016) and was the founding engineer behind Oracle Exadata. At Clumio he built one of the leading AWS data protection platforms, amassing 1,000+ enterprise customers including Atlassian and LexisNexis, and now serves as Chief Product Innovation Officer at Commvault.
Guido Appenzeller is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on AI and infrastructure investing. A two-time startup founder, he co-founded Voltage Security (acquired by HP) and Big Switch Networks (acquired by Arista), led the team that developed the OpenFlow v1.0 networking standard at Stanford's Clean Slate Lab, served as CTO at both VMware and Intel, and is now one of Silicon Valley's sharpest voices on LLM economics - having coined the term 'LLMflation' to describe the 10x-per-year cost decline in AI inference.
Raghu Raghuram is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on AI infrastructure and growth-stage investments. Born Rangarajan Raghuram, he spent nearly two decades at VMware - joining when it was a five-year-old startup and leaving as its CEO after guiding the company through the largest software acquisition in history: Broadcom's $69 billion deal. Before VMware, Ben Horowitz hired him at Netscape during the browser wars. That 30-year relationship brought him back together at a16z in October 2025, where he now helps lead the firm's AI infrastructure charge while serving as a consigliere to Horowitz himself.
Jerry Chen is a General Partner at Greylock, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he has invested since 2013. A former VMware executive who scaled the company from 250 to 15,000+ employees, Jerry coined both the term 'VDI' (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and the widely-adopted 'Systems of Intelligence' framework — a model explaining how AI and proprietary data create durable competitive moats in enterprise software. He led Greylock's early bet on Docker, sits on the board of Bluesky, and backed foundational AI tools like LlamaIndex. Defined by intellectual rigor, deep operator empathy, and a habit of asking one more question when everyone else has already stopped.
Diane Greene co-founded VMware and built it into the company that pioneered x86 virtualization, leading it through the largest tech IPO of 2007. After being ousted from VMware in 2008, she co-founded Bebop, sold it to Google for ~$380 million, and became CEO of Google Cloud - growing it from $2.1B to $8B in annual revenue. A naval architect and competitive sailor before turning to software, she is the first woman to chair the MIT Corporation and sits on the boards of Stripe, SAP, Intuit, and Maersk.
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.
Carl Eschenbach is a technology executive and investor who scaled VMware from $30M to $7B as President and COO, led transformative growth investments at Sequoia Capital including Zoom and Snowflake, and served as CEO of Workday. A former Division I wrestler inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, he brings a competitive blue-collar work ethic to Silicon Valley's boardrooms, serving on the boards of Palo Alto Networks, Aurora, Snowflake, UiPath, and Zoom while counseling executives on his "4 C's" leadership framework.
Joe Beda is the co-creator of Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine, a software engineer who helped build the infrastructure layer that now underpins the modern cloud. After a decade at Google where he made the first Kubernetes commit on GitHub, he co-founded Heptio to commercialize Kubernetes adoption, which VMware acquired in 2018 for roughly $550 million. Now semi-retired, he advises companies like Tailscale, invests in startups including Bluesky and Edera, and writes about technology at eightypercent.net - a blog named after his belief that a simpler system solving 80% of the problem beats an overengineered one that never ships.