Leadership

As a founder of Elasticsearch and the CEO of Elastic, I have been fascinated with search ever since I tried to build a recipe app for my wife in 2004, a journey that led to me writing the first few lines of code of Elasticsearch in 2009 and later founding Elastic in 2012. I believe finding beauty and excelling is a combination of perspective and grit. As someone who got into computers by counting the number of job postings in the newspaper, I love building things — a product, a community, or a company — and the process of acquiring the knowledge to do so.

Elastic's finance and operations activities are as diverse as our company. Accepting payments in a new country, providing visibility on our business outlook, solving problems creatively with IT solutions, or ensuring our employees have a welcoming and comfortable physical environment — it’s all in a day’s work for us. As CFO, I have the privilege of leading this team. Before Elastic, I worked at Cisco, VMware, and Infoblox in roles covering both finance and sales. When I’m not working, I enjoy biking Bay Area trails and spending time with my amazing wife and three awesome kids.

As the President of Worldwide Field Operations, I lead the Elastic go-to-market function, which includes field sales, solutions architecture, consulting and training, partners, and customer success. I get excited by the boundless ability of organizations who use Elastic to solve their most critical and complex challenges and harness the power of real-time, operational data. Prior to joining Elastic, I was CEO of Kinetica, an AI and advanced analytics company. For more than 20 years, I’ve successfully built and led global teams at C3 AI, BMC Software, Salesforce, Travelex, Siebel, and SAP. In my spare time, I serve on the board of the Design Tech High School and enjoy surfing, skiing, and cycling.

At Elastic, marketing is all about driving engagement with customers, partners, and the community, and helping them learn how Elastic can help to transform their organizations through search. As CMO, I lead Elastic’s global marketing efforts across our many functional areas — product marketing, field marketing, digital marketing, partner marketing, brand strategy, and corporate communications. I’m passionate about building a marketing organization that delivers the best possible experience to our users. Before Elastic, I worked at Informatica, VMWare, and Symantec, where I focused on transforming brand experiences and growing cloud businesses. Outside of the office, I enjoy spending time with my family.

I lead Elastic’s distributed engineering efforts for our products, solutions, and self-managed and SaaS offerings. Prior to joining the company, I held leadership roles at Cloud.com (acquired by Citrix) and Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo!) where I gained extensive experience in product development and open source software. After receiving my BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, I held senior engineering positions at Sun Microsystems, as well as at several startups. I used to be serious about autocross (a form of amateur car racing). Now, I’m an avid skier and enjoy going to Northstar with my family in the winters.

From recruiting to HR operations, business partnerships, and employee engagement, I have the honor of leading the team that builds, nurtures, and supports the growing number of Elasticians around the world. Prior to Elastic, I led HR at Plum Organics through a period of high growth following an acquisition by Campbell Soup Company; held various roles at Bloom Energy, which included a stint in Bangalore as the HR leader for India and Asia Pacific; and was also a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa. I hold a BA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School Business. An adventurer at heart, I’m happiest when I’m on a trail in the mountains or paddling around with my hubby and crazy kiddo.

I have the pleasure of leading an incredible team of highly skilled professionals charged with handling Elastic’s legal functions worldwide. While each step in my professional career — clerking on the DE Court of Chancery, practicing at Wilson Sonsini, an in-house position at Baan, and leading a practice group at VLP — has helped prepare me for this role at Elastic, nothing could have prepared me for the immense satisfaction I get every day from being part of such an amazing company and culture. I hold a BA from the Pennsylvania State University, an MA from the University of Chicago, and a JD from the University of Virginia. When I am not working, I enjoy spending time with my family and friends, cycling, hiking, and skiing in the Tetons.

Leading Sales at Elastic is much more than building pipeline and closing deals. It’s about harnessing the power of an amazing community. Having empathy that managing, securing, and extracting value from data is hard. Listening. Learning from every interaction to help find simple solutions to hard problems. Having spent much of my early days in athletics, words like hard-work, discipline, execution, and team are not just phrases on a motivational poster, they are deeply ingrained in who I am. I have been incredibly fortunate in my career to work with many wonderful teams at VMware, Inktomi, and now Elastic. While my travels take me around the world, home is the San Francisco Bay Area where my wife and I can usually be found on some field, pitch, or court cheering for my two awesome kids.