Sapphire Fellows Program

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.

Ray is an accomplished CEO and founder with experience across corporate strategy, business development and finance with a history of executing high-impact partnerships, acquisitions and investments for large and small enterprise software, cloud platform and mobility companies.

Prior to joining Google in 2019, Ray helped execute industry-changing strategic partnerships in roles with Microsoft Azure, VMware, and SAP. Ray was also founding CEO of TrueDemand, a mobile sales solution for the Fortune 500, which was acquired by Acosta, the largest U.S. merchandising firm. Before TrueDemand, Ray was Executive in Residence at Mayfield Fund, where he helped define, lead and launch SAP’s Auto-ID Infrastructure that achieved the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award in 2003. He previously spent 10 years in investment banking where he helped source and execute over $8.1Bn in equity, debt, M&A, and investments in the technology, media and telecom industries.

Ray graduated with honors from Harvard and as a testament to his passion -- more than his athletic ability -- Ray competed in the US Olympic Team Trials for TaeKwonDo and enjoys competing in Ironman triathlons. Ray is a recipient of the Foreign Commercial Service Award from the US Embassy in Beijing for his service in China.  He is also the author of articles in the Wall Street Journal, The US-China Business Review and others including, “The Heart of Economic Reform,“ “How China Forces State Banks to Support SOE’s” and “RFID and the Adaptive Enterprise.”

Ray enjoys a good joke in Mandarin, is the father of three wonderful children that humble him in skiing, mountain biking and swimming.

Kiran Bondalapati 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 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 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.

Jim is a hands-on strategic and operating executive whose wheelhouse is creating and aligning a company's strategic plan to proper operational structures and execution with an intense focus on building great cultures and great teams. In 2020, Jim launched the BenchBoard Executive Network, with a mission to grow the premiere leadership and knowledge sharing network for Operational Executives.

Jim is the author of several public presentations and his story can be found in a few books ("That Will Never Work" and "Netflixed"), podcasts, and now an award winning film documentary (Netflix vs the World).

As one of NetFlix's original six founding team members in 1997, Jim built and led all financial and operational systems including all postal service operations, envelope design, internal warehouse logistics, shipping, and customer service, and finance.

Since 2000, Jim has advised dozens of Silicon Valley high profile start-ups and served on various boards in addition to his roles as a director of the Alliance of CEOs, the CFO Advisory Group to Silicon Valley Bank, several Silicon Valley startup Networks and has attended the Stanford Directors College.

Jim graduated from the University of Southern California in 1989 with a dual focus in finance and biology and has lived in Portola Valley, CA for 25+ years with his wife and two children. He is an outdoor enthusiast and is still addicted to most any sport involving a ball (soccer, golf, and tennis).

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 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 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.

John Grillos has started, operated and/or financed numerous information technology companies over the past several decades. He managed four venture capital firms (founded two of them) with combined capital under management exceeding $500 million. He successfully managed nine companies through periods of disruption in their growth. He has been a highly influential director of 26 for-profit (private and public) and non-profit organizations. His efforts have helped create billions of dollars in market value and thousands of jobs. His passion is developing people, growth strategies and financial performance for companies aspiring to be the leaders in their markets.

John currently spends much of his time mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs and growth CEOs. He currently delivers lectures on entrepreneurship and fund raising in several venues including the Wharton School of Management extension in San Francisco.

John holds a bachelor’s degree from Illinois Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He served in the USMC.

For the last ten years David has been a part of the executive team building Integral Ad Science (IAS), a SaaS data and analytics company for the digital advertising industry. As chief product and strategy officer, David’s responsibilities included all aspects of product management, product & corporate strategy, capital raising, corporate & business development and M&A.

David joined IAS as part of the founding team and played a critical role in growing the business from a five person, pre-product, pre-revenue concept to a global company with an annual revenue stream of nearly $200M and over 500 employees and offices in 13 countries. David played a leading role in the acquisition of IAS by Vista Equity in one of NYCs largest private equity deals of 2018. David stepped down from his role at IAS in March 2019.

Prior to IAS, David was an executive with Safenet’s (Vector Capital) digital media services group, where he guided the company’s portfolio of digital asset protection services toward emerging opportunities in digital media distribution at major studios, record labels, and publishers. Before that, he was responsible for product management and product strategy in North America and Asia Pacific markets at MessageLabs (Symantec), one of the world’s largest SaaS messaging security organizations. He also ran product management and marketing for Mail.com, a consumer webmail service.

David is very active in the NYC startup community both as an angel investor and as a mentor. His passion lies in working with early and mid-stage technology companies helping them drive revenue, innovate products, raise capital, scale operations and implement improvements to their business processes to drive profitability.

Chris is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a long track record of building innovative companies and making the Internet a safer place.  As the first chief privacy officer, general counsel, and head of Global Public Policy for Facebook, Chris helped the company grow from its college roots to the ubiquitous communications medium that it is today.

Chris left Facebook to seek the 2010 Democratic nomination for attorney general of California, garnering 16 percent of the vote in a seven-way race.  Since the June 2010 primary, he has become an active investor in companies seeking transformational improvements in technology, media, and finance.

In 2013, Chris joined a group of California investors to purchase the Sacramento Kings of the NBA.  As an executive board member, Chris contributes his expertise in technology and management to basketball operations and the development of the Golden 1 Center, Downtown Commons, and other real estate assets.

As an attorney in private practice, Chris represented Netscape in the Microsoft antitrust case and Diamond Multimedia in the groundbreaking suit over the MP3 player that furthered personal use rights over digital content.  Chris received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University, a master’s degree from Yale University, and his law degree from Harvard University.

Kevin Knieriem is the chief revenue officer at Clari. Clari transforms the way enterprises sell, delivering new insights to drive action; combining the power of mobile technology, machine learning, predictive analytics, and beautiful design to help revenue teams be more productive, forecast more accurately, and make better business decisions.

In this role, Kevin not only leads go to market (GTM) for Clari, but has gained a unique perspective advising their hundreds of customers on Revenue Operations and GTM best practices.

Kevin brings over 20 years of B2B revenue sales and operational management with companies of varying levels of scale; from pre-revenue, to growth, to Fortune 500. Most recently, he spent more than four years at Oracle where he held several leadership positions, including CRO at DataScience.com (acquired by Oracle in June 2018). In this role, Kevin established and led DataScience.com’s demand generation, field marketing, sales and customer success initiatives from pre-revenue through acquisition by Oracle. During this time, DataScience.com helped define and then lead the Forrester Wave for Predictive Analytics & Machine Learning Platforms. Prior to that, he spent over a decade at SAP where he led regional and national organizations. Kevin started his selling career at Siebel Systems, the pioneer in CRM.

Kevin holds bachelor’s in food marketing from Saint Joseph’s University. He’s a graduate of the executive leadership program at IESE Business School and an active member of the Forbes Business Council.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

Karan Singh is the VP of Revenue Operations at Procore Technologies. Karan is an accomplished Revenue Operations and Strategy executive with experience in building best in class operations functions for companies at varying levels of scale and growth, with a focus on establishing and driving GTM strategy and efficient scale through process and technology.

Karan is currently the VP of Revenue Operations & Strategy at Procore, the leading project management platform for the construction industry. At Procore, Karan is responsible for driving the revenue strategy, planning and insights functions.

Prior to joining Procore, Karan built out the Sales Operations team for Cloudera and ArcSight as the companies scaled rapidly towards a public event and long term sustainability or acquisition. In addition to serving as an in seat operator at hyper growth enterprise companies, Karan has also served as a strategic consultant to a litany of technology companies in and outside the Silicon Valley, giving him a unique perspective on what operational requirements are relevant for various stages of maturity and scale.

John Torrey has served as Chief Ecosystem Officer and, previously, Chief Corporate Development Officer at Qualtrics since July 2017. In this role, Mr. Torrey has helped Qualtrics define and create an ecosystem of services, consulting and technology partners for the Experience Management category, launch the Qualtrics Developer Platform, execute acquisitions in the SMB and industry thought leadership domains, and negotiate the largest sale of a private-software company in history.

Before Qualtrics, Mr. Torrey was Chief Corporate Development Officer at SAP SE, where he was globally responsible for M&A and strategic business development.  He was also the Chief Strategy Officer of the Business Network & Applications group, which housed several of the company’s public cloud acquisitions (e.g., Concur, Ariba, Fieldglass) and was the only separately reportable segment of SAP.

Before SAP, Mr. Torrey was the EVP of Corporate Strategy at Concur Technologies, Inc., where he led more than 20 acquisitions and investments and the company’s strategic partnerships.  He ultimately negotiated the sale of the company to SAP in what was, at the time, the largest cloud acquisition in history at the highest forward revenue multiple ever paid for a publicly traded company.

Mr. Torrey has appeared on CNBC and Bloomberg TV, and he has contributed to print media such as The Deal, The New York Times, and MarketWatch.  Mr. Torrey was licensed as a CPA in California and was series 7 and 63 certified.

Mr. Torrey currently serves on the Board of Regents of Santa Clara University, where he was President of the Alumni Association and a Mentor at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. He graduated cum laude from the Honors Program at Santa Clara University, where he majored in accounting, minored in music, and played for the rugby team.

He and his wife, Juliette, live in San Mateo, California, and Fort Worth, Texas.  He’s an avid runner and sports fan.

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 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 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 LeClaire 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.