Sapphire Fellows Program

John Baird

Sapphire Fellow

John is considered to be one of the premier executive coaches in Silicon Valley, having coached CEOs and founders for over 20 years. Having founded three coaching firms, John built his career working with the top leaders at companies ranging from early stage start-ups to Fortune 500 firms like Apple and Nike. His first company ExecutivEdge (with Michele Bolton) in many ways set the standard for executive coaching in Silicon Valley over 25 years ago. After leaving ExecutivEdge, he started Edgeman Coaching to continue his work with established companies, including Marketo and Krux.

John’s passion for bringing strong leadership and culture building skills to early stage ventures resulted in the founding of Velocity Group in 2015 (with Ben Tauber). John is currently the Senior Partner at Velocity. He and Managing Partner Edward Sullivan have positioned Velocity as the “go to” coaching firm for early stage companies beginning to scale. They have worked with companies at various stages of growth including AirTable, Clover Health, CultureAmp, Doordash, Grail, Healthtap, MasterClass, Remitly, and many others.

John brings a strong business perspective to his work, helping leaders leverage their natural talents and expand their skill sets to the next level. John is passionate about innovation and change and helps leaders scale and transform their teams and organizations while building cultures of inclusion and diversity. CEOs have found his advice, counsel and practical tools critical to scaling their companies and avoiding many of the pitfalls along the way. John holds a Ph.D. in organizational communication and leadership from Purdue University. He spent 17 years on the faculty at San Jose State University in the College of Business and was named outstanding professor of the university during his time there.

Kiran Bondalapati

Sapphire Fellow

Kiran leads the container and mesos infrastructure team at Uber.

He was a co-founder of ZeroStack, Inc. and served as its CTO and vice president of engineering. Prior to that he was a key engineer working on virtualization, security and performance at Bromium and AMD. Kiran enjoys building teams and systems that solve problems in an elegant and scalable way. He has valuable experience in handling legacy code and organizations and also scaling them from zero to one. Kiran has a Ph.D. from University of Southern California and a bachelor’s from IIT, Delhi.

Richard Campione

Sapphire Fellow

Mr. Campione has 35 years experience in the software industry working on business application and infrastructure problems, spanning On-Premise and SaaS models, with a focus on the market analysis to product development lifecycle, and the customer acquisition to customer success lifecycle.

His experience working in large multi-national corporations, such as Splunk, Oracle, Siebel, and SAP, and smaller private companies, such as Findly, ViewStar, and KnowMedia, as well as his board level roles at companies like Mavenlink, Winshuttle, and ServiceSource, he has seen various approaches to scaling a business appropriate at different stages of maturity.

He has served in roles ranging from chairman of the board, CEO, and chief product officer to head of global presales, international business development, and head of engineering and SaaS operations.

Cheryl Chavez

Sapphire Fellow

Cheryl is an experienced product management executive who has built best-in-class, award-winning, customer-obsessed products. She has experience building and scaling world-class product management and user experience organizations, and a passion for inspiring and leading high execute teams that deliver products with a fantastic user experience.

She is currently chief product officer for Engagio, an account-centric platform to orchestrate and measure Account Based Marketing and sales.

Previously, Cheryl served as group vice president of product management and UX for Marketo, a leader in marketing automation, pre-IPO through their being taken private. She was with the company for 8 years, starting as the first product manager in 2009 to leading an organization of 40+ product managers and designers.

Ray Elias

Sapphire Fellow

Ray is responsible for brand, communications, customer acquisition and customer retention at HotelTonight where he has been CMO since June 2016.

Ray was previously CMO at StubHub for 11 years, acquired by eBay in 2007, where he helped build a game-changing consumer-marketplace and brand that completely disrupted the live entertainment industry. He was named “40 Under 40” by Sports Business Journal in 2013. Prior to that, Ray was a pioneer in search and digital marketing at Esurance, which was acquired by Allstate in 2011. He began his 20 year career in the late nineties with early stage Internet start-ups in the action sports, health, and fitness verticals and hasn’t held a real job since.

He also serves on the board of directors for Genesys Works, an education non-profit that helps high school youth from under served communities get placed in paid internships and go to college. Ray has a bachelor’s in economics from The University of Texas.

Ray is a native Tex-ifornian. He was born in California, educated in Texas, and he has planted his roots in the Bay Area for the last 18 years with his wife and son. He coaches youth soccer, and is an avid runner and snowboarder, but not at the same time.

Justin Fitzhugh

Sapphire Fellow

Justin is responsible for building, expanding and operating the company’s world-class endpoint-aware application delivery infrastructure, ensuring impeccable reliability and scale.

He brings over 17 years of experience to Instart Logic, most recently as CIO and vice president of technical operations at Jive. Prior to Jive, Justin ran engineering operations at Mozilla for over 5 years where his team scaled the infrastructure from two racks to seven global data centers serving over 25% of the Internet and 500 million users. In addition Justin bootstrapped the business intelligence group while also managing the web development, support, infrastructure security, operations and architecture groups, growing the team to over 90.

Previously Justin has worked at Cisco, Macromedia, Currenex and holds a degree in computer sciences from University of the Pacific.

Arnnon Geshuri

Sapphire Fellow

Arnnon Geshuri is the chief people officer at Livongo. In this role, he is responsible for recruiting, onboarding, workforce development, and culture.

Previously, Arnnon was the vice president of human resources (CHRO) at Tesla and was responsible for driving people and workplace operations and global recruitment efforts. During his tenure from 2009 through 2017, he oversaw the growth of Tesla from a 400-person, scrappy startup to an integrated, sustainable-energy company with more than 35,000 employees around the globe.

Prior to Tesla, Arnnon was the senior director of staffing operations for Google where he designed the company’s legendary recruitment organization and talent acquisition strategy.  Arnnon joined Google in late 2004, when the company just emerged from its IPO and employed around 2,500 people. As their first chief staffing architect, he oversaw all aspects of global recruitment and helped Google evolve into a technology powerhouse with over 25,000 employees – a workplace considered the premier destination for ambitious software engineers.

Before Google, Arnnon was vice president of human resources and director of global staffing for E*TRADE Financial. In the first 18 months, he supported the rapid growth of the company through multiple acquisitions and hired an additional 2,000 employees to broaden the company from an online brokerage house to a fintech disruptor with an expansive portfolio of financial products and services.

Earlier in his career, he worked at Applied Materials where he served as the HR liaison to the company’s Asia Pacific operations and built and managed the corporate-wide staffing organization as the company scaled by another 7,000 global employees within 2 years.

During the 2000s, he launched a startup focused on developing project management software for the service industry and in the early 1990s, he was an organizational effectiveness consultant for New United Motors Manufacturing (NUMMI), the Fremont, Calif.-based joint venture of Toyota and General Motors.

In addition to his industry work, he currently sits on several startups and academic advisory boards including the Mechanical Engineering Department Advisory Council at San Jose State University and the Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business Master of Science Program in Business Analytics.

Arnnon has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California at Irvine and a master’s in industrial/organizational psychology from San Jose State University.

Vijaya Kaza

Sapphire Fellow

Vijaya is a technology executive with broad experience leading engineering, product management, and information security at various cybersecurity, networking and SaaS companies such as Cisco, FireEye, and Lookout.

Vijaya is currently the chief development officer at Lookout Inc., a mobile cybersecurity company named in the 2018 Forbes Cloud 100, which recognizes the best companies in cloud computing.

At Lookout, she leads all aspects of product development, threat research, and cloud operations. She also leads application and infrastructure security and is responsible for governance, risk and compliance of all Lookout data and services. Previously, as SVP of Cloud at FireEye, Vijaya led the company’s cloud/SaaS business covering their entire portfolio of cloud security products. Prior to FireEye, Vijaya served for 17 years in multiple executive and leadership roles at Cisco, where she led product development for a very broad portfolio of network security products that generated more than $1B in annual revenue.

Vijaya brings over 20 years of product, organizational, and business insights from leading startups to scaling large product organizations both in on-premise as well as SaaS worlds. She has an excellent track record for driving product strategy, top class execution, operational excellence, and building high performance teams.

Vijaya has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and dual masters degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering.

Doug Knopper

Sapphire Fellow

Doug Knopper has successfully led many media technology companies, most recently as co-CEO of FreeWheel, the prominent provider of digital television advertising technology. Doug co-founded FreeWheel in 2007, sold it to Comcast seven years later for $375 million, and spent 3.5 years at Comcast post-acquisition.

Today, Doug works as an advisor and board member to many companies, working with CEOs, boards, management teams, and venture capital partners, to help them scale and perform.

Previous to FreeWheel, Doug spent six years as general manager at DoubleClick in New York and London, and was part of the team responsible for its $1.1 billion sale. Doug also served as CEO of Bitpass, a financial technology company sold to Digital River in 2007.

Prior to that, Doug held senior roles at advertising agencies and broadcasting companies, including Chiat Day, Lowe, JWT, and Bonneville Broadcasting.

Doug holds an MBA from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s with honors from the University of Michigan. He currently resides in Palo Alto, CA with his family and beagle.

Leslie Kurkjian

Sapphire Fellow

Leslie is currently the global vice president of talent for MuleSoft, responsible for scaling the company through a successful IPO in 2017 and sale to Salesforce in 2018. Leslie came to MuleSoft from Dropbox where she was responsible for attracting, developing and retaining teams across functions. Running sales operations and strategy, she scaled the sales team more than 3x during a period of hypergrowth. Leslie also led the Dropbox Rotation Program and leadership development initiatives, focusing on growing all levels of talent throughout the company.

Previously, Leslie worked on Google’s Emerging Business team where she successfully built, scaled and managed sales teams for several new ad products. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s in Law, Letters, and Society from the University of Chicago.

Ursula Llabres

Sapphire Fellow

Ursula was named Top 100 Customer Success Strategist in 2018. For the past 19 years she has worked and led high performing customer success teams at some of the top tech companies like Oracle, Salesforce.com, Box, Microsoft, insidesales.com and now Facebook. She has experience working abroad, as well as, providing leadership to different regions (Asia, EMEA and LACA).

At Facebook she leads the Workplace by Facebook Client Success team for Americas. Bringing her enterprise SAAS experience to a consumer centered organization, Ursula is in charge of Workplace by Facebook’s customer growth, adoption and retention strategy for the region. Ursula expertise is in designing adaptable customer success strategies that fit the different stages of an organization’s journey. From designing customer segmentation and prioritization approaches, to effective success playbooks, customer journey mapping, voice of the customer process design, building churn assessment and mitigation strategies and framing success measures to drive the right behaviors and results. Ursula is passionate about connecting people, and using social networks and technologies as enablers to engaging employees and amplifying culture.

Her strengths and experience are in: customer success strategy & management, leading teams in turnaround or rapid growth situations, leadership and mentoring, business strategy consulting, change management, business application solutions, storytelling, sales, marketing, analytics, contact center operations, service management.

On a personal note, Ursula is Peruvian born & raised and moved to Canada in her late teens. She invests and is active with her two “start-ups” Lucas (8) and Matias (7), loves to participate in trail races and resides in Menlo Park, CA.

Dan Maloney

Sapphire Fellow

Dan is a passionate CEO and entrepreneur with a focus on leading and growing companies that result in meaningful outcomes. He brings 20 years of high tech experience as a strategic and operational leader for startups and software industry giants. He has a thirst for driving revenue and delivering innovative solutions to the marketplace with multiple exits driving more than $500M in value for shareholders.

He’s currently CEO of ZEPL, which delivers a notebook powered data science solution to help companies with their transformation into a model-driven enterprise. He recently wrapped up with Sapphire Ventures as a Venture Partner following his tenure as chief executive officer at Perspica, a leading-edge artificial intelligence powered APM analytics company, which he sold to Cisco.

Dan has held various executive sales, marketing and business development positions across global software enterprises such as SAP as well as leading edge startups such as AccelOps, an IT security & operational intelligence company acquired by Fortinet and TopTier Software, an enterprise portal company acquired by SAP. Dan has strong revenue growth expertise with a proven track record in large enterprise, value sales as well as high velocity, volume sales.

Dan holds a bachelor’s in management science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Tatyana Mamut

Sapphire Fellow

Tatyana Mamut is a transformative leader in Silicon Valley who drives innovation by understanding customers deeply and leading through empathy. She is a serial entre/intrapreneur, building successful new businesses at Amazon, Salesforce, and IDEO. She currently serves as an advisor to Startup Founders and C-Suite executives, guiding them on their Innovation, Customer Centricity, Scaling, and Digital Transformation journeys.

At Amazon Web Services, Tatyana was general manager & director of product, where she built a revolutionary new software product and scaled the team from two to 150 engineers, product managers, and designers. At Salesforce, she was vice president of product experience for the IoT (Internet of Things) Cloud, where she led the vision and development for the democratization of IoT technology. She has a successful track record of building innovative products and teams from the ground up in complex and highly regulated environments.

Tatyana was also a leader at IDEO, where she built and led the Organization Design practice globally, helping complex public and private companies build innovation capabilities. Tatyana has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from University of California Berkeley and a bachelor's in economics from Amherst College. She is a refugee from eastern Ukraine and comes from three generations of Soviet professional women. She lives with her spouse, two daughters, and Siberian street dog in San Francisco.

Chris McClain

Sapphire Fellow

Chris McClain is the principal at Growth Accelerators and has over 25 years experience in B2B revenue sales and operational management. He founded Growth Accelerators to help emerging SaaS companies grow from millions to hundreds of millions in revenue.

Most recently, Chris served as the SVP of Global Enterprise Business at DocuSign, which went public in 2018. For three years, he successfully led and scaled the company’s go-to-market operations from $100M to over $500M.

Prior to DocuSign, he was the EVP of Americas Strategic Industries at SAP, where he was responsible for the overall business operations, strategy, and sales for SAP’s Industries in North and Latin America. Chris also served as the EVP of Global Mobile Sales and Solutions as well as the EVP of Global Strategic Accounts.

Before SAP, Chris held high-profile executive roles leading sales and operations for Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft, and Oracle. Through his experience, he’s developed a scalable framework to help companies realize their full growth potential. Chris has a bachelor’s in business – MIS from California State University, Sacramento.

Avanish Sahai

Sapphire Fellow

Avanish is a customer-obsessed, relationship-driven technology leader, investor, and entrepreneur. He has helped grow firms from zero to $100M, and has raised over $120M in venutre capital funds. He is currently an executive at ServiceNow and a member of the Board of Directors of HubSpot, as well as an investor/advisor in various early stage companies.

Previously, he was a senior leader at Salesforce, McKinsey, Oracle and various enterprise software startups. He is also a member of the boards of World Affairs and BayBrazil. Avanish is a global citizen: born in India, raised in Brazil, and educated in the US.

Eric Schrader

Sapphire Fellow

A serial entrepreneur with extensive background scaling high-growth startups from early stage through IPO, Eric is currently the chief customer officer at BetterWorks. Previously he served as vice president of professional services at Coupa Software and vice president of product marketing and vice president of professional services at Agile Software.

Eric has demonstrated success in the definition, launch, delivery and adoption of customer-centric SaaS product and service offerings for multiple industries in North America, EMEA, APAC and LATAM. Eric has leveraged his expertise in systems, processes, revenue recognition, financial practices and compliance to help companies scale and transition from private to public. Eric has participated in due diligence and spearheaded integrations efforts for multiple M&A transactions. Eric holds a bachelor’s mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois.

Eyal Shavit

Sapphire Fellow

Before joining SamsungNEXT, Eyal was the CTO at Sports Illustrated Play (acquired by NBC), a sports technology platform for youth and amateur sports. Eyal was also the Chief Product Officer focused on innovation at Deluxe, the largest provider of post-production technology for major movie studios and online services such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple.

Before Deluxe, Eyal played key engineering roles at companies such as Tagged, IdleGames and Macrovision where he managed worldwide engineering for an internationalized game syndication and commerce platform, servicing over 250 affiliates including major portals such as Yahoo! Games worldwide, AOL Games, Disney and Earthlink.

Eyal brings 20 years of experience in Artificial Intelligence, building products at scale, hiring top talent and growing teams in-house and distributed world-wide. He took part of multiple successful acquisitions on both sides of the transaction and has helped build over 30 of international systems and products serving at times over 300 million users.

Eyal holds a Ph.D. in computer science (Artificial Intelligence), a master’s in computer science (Artificial Intelligence) and bachelor’s in computer science and mathematics.

Adam Spiegel

Sapphire Fellow

Adaml has over 30 years of strategic finance, consulting and operating experience. Most recently, he served as chief financial officer of Glassdoor, Inc., one of the world’s largest job and recruiting sites. While at Glassdoor, Mr. Spiegel built a public company-ready finance organization that supported the hyper growth of the business as it scaled to over 700 employees in seven offices in the US, Europe and South America.

Previously, Adam served as chief financial officer of RPX Corporation (RPXC), the leading provider of subscription-based corporate patent risk management solutions. During his four year tenure at RPX, revenue grew from near zero to over $200 million and RPX completed a successful $185 million initial public offering and a $60 million secondary offering. Adam put in place the finance organization that enabled this rapid scaling and successful operation as a public company.

Prior to RPX, he served as chief operating officer and/or chief financial officer for early stage companies in the life sciences field.

Earlier in his career, Adam spent over a decade as an investment banker advising a wide variety of technology, financial services, and industrial companies on strategic mergers and acquisitions, and capital markets transactions valued in excess of $8.5 billion. Adam started his career as a communications satellite systems engineer for Booz Allen & Hamilton. Mr. Spiegel holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.

Yvonne Wassenaar

Sapphire Fellow

Yvonne Wassenaar is a seasoned executive with over 25 years experience advising leaders across the globe on scaling and diversifying their businesses throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. She has broad industry experience working with start-ups and F1000 companies across retail, consumer products, utilities, professional services, and technology.

Most recently Yvonne served as CEO at Airware; a pioneer in the creation of the commercial drone marketplace. In this role she drove significant operational improvements and proved the business value of drones in building cloud-based digital twins of the physical world to enable advanced analytics for mining, construction and insurance customers. Prior to this Yvonne was Chief Information Officer and senior vice president of operations at New Relic, a 100% cloud-based software analytics company. During her time at New Relic, Yvonne was instrumental in the company’s successful IPO and early years as a public company managing the private to public transition and leading key growth initiatives that strengthened the company’s move into enterprise and the expansion into new product areas.

Earlier, Yvonne held multiple leadership positions at VMware, scaling the company from $2B to $6B. She drove over $55 million of annual innovation investments, supported more than eight acquisitions for the company and several divestitures. As a lead partner in the development of VMware’s hybrid cloud business, Yvonne guided the company’s transition into a blended business model that supported both on-premise software and cloud-based solution offerings. Yvonne began her career as a software engineer at Accenture, where she held many leadership roles during her 17 years. These included running the corporate development team for the company’s $4B Communications, Media, and Technology business unit, leading the company’s $40M global sales operations community of practice, and co-authoring Accenture’s definitive blueprint for B2B go-to-market transformation; helping clients more effectively sell into the enterprise.

Yvonne currently serves on the board of directors and is a member of the audit committee for Forrester (FORR). Yvonne also serves on the Harvey Mudd College Board of Trustees, serves as an Advisor to Snyk (a DevOps security start-up). Previously Yvonne served as the CEO Board Director for Airware, on the board of directors and audit committee for MuleSoft acquired by Salesforce in 2018, Bitium acquired by Google in 2017, and the Athena Alliance, a non-profit focused on building diverse boards.

Yvonne holds a bachelor’s in economics from UCLA and an MBA in strategy and operations from UCLA’s Anderson School of Business. Her market impact earned her recognition as a Woman of Influence in Silicon Valley; theBoardlist Top 20, SF Business Times Public Company CIO Award Winner, and as a WSJ Woman of Note. Yvonne thrives when working with other talented individuals who share her commitment to delivering impact. She is an avid traveler and uses her experiences abroad to deepen her understanding of human interaction and experience.

Courtnee Westendorf

Sapphire Fellow

Courtnee Westendorf has a relentless pursuit to positively impact the lives of others. Whether through her successful 25 year career developing globally recognized marketing initiatives or the creation of a platform to foster self confidence and combat bullying, her goal is to connect with people and make a difference in their lives.

Westendorf most recently served as the Oakland Raiders chief marketing officer, SVP of marketing. She was chartered with the development and execution of all marketing and event strategies as the franchise relocates to Las Vegas, Nevada. Over the past three years, she led the evolution and growth of the Raiders brand, as the team looked to strengthen its relationship with one of the most diverse and passionate global fan bases in the NFL.

Prior to joining the Raiders, Westendorf served as vice president of marketing for Intel, redefining marketing partnerships for the company through unique engagements with some of the world’s leading sports properties, including Barcelona FC and the San Francisco 49ers. Prior to Intel, she was vice president of consumer marketing for Disney, responsible for developing go-to-market strategies for Disney digital and entertainment properties.

Westendorf started her career at Apple, spending over a decade in senior marketing roles leading brand and consumer partnerships, as well as serving in an array of key marketing functions in support of the company’s launches of the iMac, iTunes, the iPod, iPhone, the App ecosystem and related products and services.

Westendorf holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from Loyola Marymount University and a Master’s degree in education from Pepperdine University. She is a fifth-generation Bay Area Californian residing in San Jose with her daughters.