Board of Directors

Paul Santinelli
North Bridge Venture Partners

Paul Santinelli joined the team at North Bridge Venture Partners in 2005, focusing on investments in Open Source, software, security, internet applications and infrastructure and communications.  Previously, he served as director of Red Hat Network and was responsible for product definition, strategy, engineering, product management, marketing and lifecycle management for the company’s flagship software services offering.  Paul also served as the director of global information systems and technology during his tenure at Red Hat.

Prior to Red Hat, Paul was founder and CEO of NOCpulse, Inc., a Silicon Valley software startup focused on delivering the next generation enterprise systems management platform.  NOCpulse was acquired by Red Hat in October 2002.  While at NOCpulse, Paul was nominated for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2002.  Before founding NOCpulse, Paul was chief technology officer of Global Center and VP of technology for Global Crossing, a telecommunications company that built and operated the world’s first independent global fiber optic network.  During the past twelve years, Paul has held various engineering, product management and marketing positions in companies including Red Hat, IBM, Lotus Development and Compuware.

Prior to North Bridge, Paul served on the advisory boards of Arrowpoint Communications (acquired by Cisco), Inflow, Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape), Mobility.net (acquired by Software.com) and One Secure (acquired by Netscreen).

Paul received a B.S. from Emerson College in Boston.

John Vrionis
Lightspeed Venture Partners

John Vrionis joined Lightspeed in 2006 and focuses primarily on Information Technology Infrastructure. His specific areas of interest include cloud computing, datacenter virtualization, next generation storage, and datacenter scalability.  He is currently actively involved or a Board Member with AppDynamics, Cirtas, Delphix, Embrane, Evolv On Demand, MapR Technologies, Nimble Storage, and Pliant.
 
Prior to Lightspeed, John worked as an entrepreneur and operating executive.  John helped lead product management and marketing with Determina (acquired by VMware) and was an initial member of the management team at Freedom Financial Network.     
 
John holds an MBA from Stanford University, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and a BA from Harvard University.

Peter Sonsini
NEA

Pete joined NEA in 2005 and is the co-lead of the firm’s Enterprise, Infrastructure & Services (EIS) practice group. His current investments include Apprenda, BeachMint, BuzzMedia, Conviva, Engine Yard, Eucalyptus Systems, MapR, Splashtop and Tintri. Previous boards include Xensource (acquired by Citrix Systems) and Teracent (acquired by Google). Pete also serves on the board of the Silicon Valley Forum (www.svforum.org).

Prior to joining NEA, Pete was Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at VMware where he struck the company's OEM deals and grew annual sales through OEMs from $0 to $40 million in four years. Prior to VMware, Pete was one of the first hires on the business side at Mirapoint, where he ran product management. Pete also served in various sales and marketing positions in Hewlett-Packard’s server division, including Worldwide Product Manager for the mid-range server business. Pete began his career at Montgomery Securities where he was an Associate in the firm’s Technology Corporate Finance group. Pete received his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and his BA in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he lettered in varsity rugby and was a member of the national championship team.

Robert Finocchio

Robert J. Finocchio, Jr. is a corporate director, private investor, part-time professor, and consultant.  Since September 2000 Mr. Finocchio has been a dean’s executive professor at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. He currently is a director at Altera Corporation (Lead independent director, Nominating and Governance Committee Chair, member Audit Committee), and Echelon Corporation (Lead independent director, Audit Committee Chair), and at CaseCentral, Embrane,  and Silver-Peak (private companies).

From August 1997 to September 2000 he served as Chairman of the Board of Informix Corporation, an information management software company, From July 1997 until July 1999, Mr. Finocchio served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Informix. From December 1988 until May 1997, Mr. Finocchio was employed with 3Com Corporation where he held various positions, most recently serving as President, 3Com Systems. Prior to 3Com he spent nine years at ROLM Corporation. Mr. Finocchio is chair of the Board of Trustees at of Santa Clara University and a venture partner at Advanced Technology Ventures.

Mr. Finocchio holds a B.S. (magna cum laude) in economics from Santa Clara University and an M.B.A. (Baker Scholar, with high distinction) from the Harvard Business School.

Dante Malagrinò
Co-Founder, President & CEO, Embrane

Dante’s experience in the high-tech industry goes from engineering to marketing and sales.  He joined Cisco in 1999 as a software architect and then moved into technical marketing and product management roles when he became part of the founding team of Andiamo Systems, a spin-off that Cisco created in 2001 to enter the storage networking market and which delivered the Cisco MDS product line.

When Cisco completed the acquisition of Andiamo, Dante moved to Europe, where he led Cisco’s data center marketing and business development. In 2007, he was summoned back to San Jose to lead the data center infrastructure marketing campaign in the Central Marketing Organization (CMO.)  Before leaving Cisco to start Embrane Software, Dante was a Director in the office of the CTO of the Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit (formerly Nuova Systems.)

Dante holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science Engineering from Politecnico di Torino and several patents in the areas of networking, storage and data center infrastructure.  He also has experience as spokesperson with press, analysts and investors and he represented Cisco in several official industry organizations, such as SNIA Europe.

Marco Di Benedetto
Co-Founder, CTO, Embrane

Marco has over 13 years of experience in the networking industry. He spent 8 years in software development, starting at Cisco with the Catalyst 6000 product line, where he architected the software infrastructure for high availability and created enhancements to the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) that are now considered table stakes of any implementation (among others, IEEE 802.1s, Root Guard and Loop Guard.)

As a member of the founding team of Andiamo Systems, he architected SAN-OS, the Operating System for the MDS platform, now re-branded as NX-OS and used as the primary data center operating system on Cisco Nexus devices.

After one year as Network Consulting Engineer for Cisco in the Asia Pacific region, based in Beijing, he joined Nuova Systems in 2007 as a senior member of the Technical Marketing team. In his role at Nuova and later at Cisco, Marco focused on the definition of a Cisco-wide technology roadmap for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), as well as on solutions for designing 10Gb/s Ethernet networks in the data center.

Marco has a portfolio of 20 patents.

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