Executive Team

 

Jedidiah Yueh, President and CEO

In 1999, Jedidiah Yueh founded Avamar, a software company that pioneered data de-duplication and shipped a billion-dollar product in the backup and recovery industry, with over 20,000 current customers. Today, de-duplication is a high priority for enterprise data centers, and the technology has become a must-have feature or product for major storage and software vendors. Data de-duplication strips away redundant data to make disks more cost effective than tape media for storing a wide variety of data types, such as daily, repeated backup sets. EMC acquired Avamar in November 2006 for $165 million. EMC executives have stated that Avamar is the best performing investment for EMC since VMware.

Yueh has demonstrated a successful track record for identifying new market opportunities and staying ahead of industry trends. As VP of Product Management at EMC, Yueh helped launch the Avamar Data Store and the Avamar Virtual Edition in 2007, two innovative and successful products that have helped EMC maintain a leadership position in the industry. Prior to Avamar, Yueh served as Chief Operating Officer for NTD, an optical storage startup. He brings over a decade of experience in the software and data storage industries and has more than 6 patents or patents pending.

Yueh graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude with an AB from Harvard University. Under former President George H. Bush, he was designated a US Presidential Scholar, one of the highest academic achievements awarded nationally.

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Karthik Rau, VP Products and Marketing

For over a decade, Karthik Rau has played instrumental roles in defining products and marketing at industry-shaping software companies, including VMware and Opsware. From 2002-2009, he held several executive leadership positions at VMware and reported to CEOs Diane Greene and later Paul Maritz. Rau was most recently Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, overseeing all corporate, field, channel, and alliance marketing across all geographies. Prior to his role in marketing, Rau owned responsibility for VMware's server product portfolio and roadmaps as Vice President of Product Management. Rau led the product and go-to-market strategy for many of VMware's most commercially successful efforts, from the first release of the VirtualCenter management suite to the VMware Infrastructure 3 and vSphere 4 virtualization platforms. Prior to joining VMware, Rau led efforts to create the first commercial version of the Opsware server automation products as a product manager at Opsware (then named Loudcloud).

Rau holds MS and BS degrees in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with distinction, was named a Mayfield and Valentine Fellow, and received the Frederick Terman Engineering Scholastic Award.

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Alok Srivastava, VP Engineering

Alok Srivastava has been responsible for much of the innovation and development for Oracle clusterware (CRS) and Oracle cluster database server (RAC), which have driven billions of dollars in revenue for Oracle with over 30,000 customer deployments. Most recently, Srivastava managed multiple R&D and multi-platform engineering teams spanning US and India, as Director of Engineering at Oracle.

Srivastava has 22+ years of systems software R&D, engineering, and operations experience spanning real-time systems, parallel and distributed systems, OS internals, cluster database server, and cluster systems management. Srivastava was one of the core designers of India's first massively parallel processing computer, PARAM. He was on the team responsible for defining and implementing the Quality Management System at Wipro Systems in India, leading to its ISO9000 certification.

Srivastava has a Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering from IIT, Roorkee, India, and an MBA from The Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. He has over 30+ patents and patents pending in the areas of cluster database server internals, cluster systems management, and distributed systems diagnosis.

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Kaycee Lai, VP Sales

Kaycee Lai played an instrumental role in building sales and defining the go-to-market strategy for Avamar and the data de-duplication market in general. As Director of Sales at Avamar, Lai made several ground-breaking sales that helped transition Avamar's de-duplication solution from an evangelical sale to a more repeatable and mainstream sale. Far and away Avamar's top performer in transactions and total revenue, Lai helped Avamar achieve triple digit growth rates over several successive quarters, which helped drive Avamar's acquisition by EMC in 2006.

At EMC, Lai ran all of Avamar sales for Asia Pacific and Japan, where he built the business from infancy to the fastest growing product line at EMC in the region, with an annual growth rate of over 400%. After his success with Avamar, his leadership responsibilities increased to include EMC's entire backup, recovery, and archive portfolio. As general manager for a $120 million business unit, Lai managed a staff of over 100 people over 10 countries, with 36% year-over-year growth.

Earlier in his career Lai played a key role in helping Microsoft capture 50% of the NAS market share in units shipped as Sales Business Manager, and he began his career at EMC managing sales operations for an $800 million division as part of EMC's strategic planning team. Kaycee earned his Bachelor's degree from Pomona College in Claremont, CA.

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Boris Klots, Chief Architect

An innovator and architect, Boris Klots has made significant contributions to many of Silicon Valley's premier technology companies. Earlier in his career, Klots was co-inventor of database cache fusion, which was a defining technical advance that enabled Oracle to develop RAC and to win several transaction processing benchmarks at the time. He was awarded the "Special Contribution to the Success of Oracle" prize in 1999.

Over the last 25 years, his areas of innovation have spanned large-scale distributed parallel systems, database engines, data storage, security, algorithms and optimizations, data mining, clusters, and grid computing. As Senior Director of Engineering at Yahoo!, he built and managed a high performance team that developed a massively scalable click-fraud protection system. As Fellow and Director of Engineering at Motorola, he architected a wireless end-to-end services platform. In 2004, he won recognition as one of the most prolific inventors in the company.

Klots has 28 patents and 20 patents pending in cluster computing, database internals, storage, wireless, and Internet technologies. Klots holds an advanced degree in Mathematics and Physics (Theory of Optimization) from Moscow Technical University of Electronics and Mathematics. He has an MS in Mathematics, magna cum laude, from Moscow State University.

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Board of Directors

 

Jedidiah Yueh, President and CEO

In 1999, Jedidiah Yueh founded Avamar, a software company that pioneered data de-duplication and shipped a billion-dollar product in the backup and recovery industry, with over 20,000 current customers. Today, de-duplication is a high priority for enterprise data centers, and the technology has become a must-have feature or product for major storage and software vendors. Data de-duplication strips away redundant data to make disks more cost effective than tape media for storing a wide variety of data types, such as daily, repeated backup sets. EMC acquired Avamar in November 2006 for $165 million. EMC executives have stated that Avamar is the best performing investment for EMC since VMware.

Yueh has demonstrated a successful track record for identifying new market opportunities and staying ahead of industry trends. As VP of Product Management at EMC, Yueh helped launch the Avamar Data Store and the Avamar Virtual Edition in 2007, two innovative and successful products that have helped EMC maintain a leadership position in the industry. Prior to Avamar, Yueh served as Chief Operating Officer for NTD, an optical storage startup. He brings over a decade of experience in the software and data storage industries and has more than 6 patents or patents pending.

Yueh graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude with an AB from Harvard University. Under former President George H. Bush, he was designated a US Presidential Scholar, one of the highest academic achievements awarded nationally.

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Arnold Silverman

Arnold Silverman was a founding board member of Oracle and a founding investor in Business Objects, which was acquired by SAP in 2007. In 1995, he founded Discovery Ventures as a vehicle to help other entrepreneurs create companies of lasting value. Some of Discovery's most notable investments include: Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA), Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape), Epiphany, and TimesTen Performance Software (acquired by Oracle). Prior to his investment career, Silverman served as CEO of ICOT Corporation where he engineered a turn-around of the company and took it to leadership positions in the airline reservation systems and fraud detection markets. He led the company's acquisition of Amati Communications and ultimately the company's strategic sale to Texas Instruments. Previously, he worked for Dymo Industries, a New York Stock Exchange company, rising to become president of the company. Earlier in his career, he held various engineering roles at Hewlett Packard.

Silverman was elected Chairman of the AeA (American Electronics Association) in its 50th anniversary year. He currently serves as a Trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation and chair of the Finance Committee. He graduated with a BS and MS in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley, and holds an MBA from the Columbia Business School.

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Asheem Chandna

Asheem Chandna (follow on Twitter @chandna) is a Partner at Greylock Partners. He has helped create and grow multiple technology businesses and product lines to market-leading positions — both as a former operating executive and as a venture capitalist. His current company boards and investments include AppDynamics, Delphix, Imperva, Palo Alto Networks, Sourcefire (FIRE), TechProcess Solutions and Xsigo Systems. Previous company boards and investments include Aruba Networks (ARUN), CipherTrust (MCAF), NetBoost (INTC), PortAuthority Technologies (WBSN), and Securent (CSCO).

Chandna joined Greylock from Check Point Software, where he was vice-president of business development and product management. During his 6+ year tenure, Check Point grew from $10M to $500M+ in annual revenues. Chandna founded the business development and product management organizations, led corporate marketing during high growth years, and directed Check Point's product/business strategy, product management, and industry partnerships. Prior to Check Point, Chandna was vice-president of marketing with CoroNet Systems (acquired by Compuware), where he helped create and define a new product category for application-aware network monitoring. Previously, Chandna held strategic marketing and product line positions with SynOptics/Bay Networks and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Chandna is a charter member of TiE Silicon Valley, on the panel of judges for the Wall Street Journal Global Technology Innovation Awards, on the advisory board and program committee for the RSA Conference, and part of the VC program at DeVenCI (Defense Venture Capital Initiative). Born and raised in India, Chandna holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Case Western Reserve University.

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Chris Schaepe

Chris Schaepe is a founder and Managing Director of Lightspeed Venture Partners, covering infrastructure technologies and services. Schaepe has frequently been named to the Forbes Midas List of top venture capital investors for investments including Avamar, Brocade, Ciena, Quantum Effect Devices and Riverbed Technology. He has eighteen years of venture capital experience and four years of operating experience. Prior to Lightspeed, Schaepe served in corporate finance and capital markets roles at Goldman, Sachs & Co. after his employment as a software engineer at IBM.

Schaepe holds BS and MS degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Stanford University.

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