Leadership

Software Developer, Creator of Elasticsearch.

Aaron Katz is Chief Revenue Officer at Elastic, responsible for all sales and partnership activities at the company. Previously, Katz spent 12 years at Salesforce in a variety of sales leadership roles, helping scale the company from $20M to more than $4B in annual revenue. While there, he built and led sales teams across nearly every region, segment, and industry, including in-country executive leadership roles in Asia Pacific and EMEA. Prior to Salesforce.com, Katz held management roles at BenefitPoint (acquired by Vertafore) and international consulting / corporate finance roles at PeopleSoft and Sun Microsystems, respectively. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Managerial Economics from the University of California at Davis.

Kevin Kluge is Senior Vice President of Engineering at Elastic, responsible for engineering of the Elastic platform. Previously, Kevin was Vice President of Engineering at Citrix, responsible for engineering of Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack. Prior to joining Citrix as part of the Cloud.com acquisition, Kevin was the Vice President of Engineering of Cloud.com, where he led all product development activities. Kevin was also Vice President of Engineering for Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo!), where he helped establish the company as the leader in open source collaboration and email solutions. Kevin has also held senior engineering positions at several other start-ups and Sun Microsystems. Kevin has a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Gaurav Gupta is Vice President of Product Management at Elastic. He leads the product team and is responsible for defining the company's product strategy, roadmap, and new feature development. Prior to joining Elastic, Gaurav worked at Splunk as VP of Products, where he was responsible for the overall user experience of the company's core enterprise product, including its indexing, search, and analytics technology. At Splunk he also led the development of the company's Cloud and online offerings, including Splunk Storm, Splunk Apps, and Splunk Answers. Prior to Splunk, he worked in product and strategy roles at Google, Gateway, and the McKenna Group, and also spent time as a venture capitalist. Gaurav has a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Leah Sutton is the Vice President of Human Resources at Elastic and responsible for all facets of HR. Prior to Elastic, Leah was the Senior Director of HR at Plum Organics where she was responsible for supporting the leadership team through a period of high growth and change post-acquisition by Campbell Soup Company. Prior to working at Plum, Leah spent five years with Bloom Energy, a Silicon Valley-based clean tech. During her tenure at Bloom, she held various HR roles, including a stint in Bangalore as the HR leader for India and Asia Pacific. She was also a consultant at Deloitte and a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa. Leah holds a BA in Anthropology & African Studies from the University of Wisconsin — Madison and an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Nick is the former Chief Financial Officer of SpringSource and Talend, two of the largest open source technology companies. He was instrumental in the growth of SpringSource, its sale to VMWare for over $400M and its acquisitions of Covalent, G2One, Hyperic, and Cloud Foundry. Nick also served as CFO at Transitive, a UK-based software company best known for developing Rosetta for Apple, which Steve Jobs referred to as “the Most Amazing Software You'll Never See." Prior to Transitive, Nick held various senior financial positions including Controller, at Next and a Senior Audit Manager, at Coopers and Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers). Nick is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales, and a member of the AICPA and the California Society of CPAs.

Jeff Yoshimura leads global marketing at Elastic with 20 years of B2B technology and consulting experience. Most recently, Jeff launched a few startups in the machine learning and analytics space, including Ayasdi, where he was awarded the Sage Group/WSJ 2013 Big Data Marketer of the Year for taking the company out of stealth after 10 years of R&D at Stanford and DARPA. Previously, Jeff was a founding team member at Zuora, and spent 5 years in sales, marketing, and business development leadership functions. Prior to Zuora, Jeff was one of the first few hundred pre-IPO employees at Salesforce, and in 5 years, Jeff led the company's first 10K seat deployment, launched the AppExchange, and helped the company get to its first $1B in revenues. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Managerial Economics from the University of California at Davis.

W.H. Baird Garrett is Elastic’s Senior Vice President of Legal, having joined Elastic in July of 2015, after acting as outside counsel to the Company for nearly three years. Baird brings 20 years of experience in the representation of emerging growth technology companies to his position with the Company. Prior to joining Elastic, Baird was the Chair of VLP Law Group’s Technology Transactions practice, where he provided counsel to both emerging growth and larger companies regarding technology and intellectual property transactions and other commercial contracts matters. Baird began his career at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati in Palo Alto, CA and Seattle, WA, after clerking for the Honorable Jack B. Jacobs on the Delaware Court of Chancery. Baird holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from the Pennsylvania State University.

Craig Griffin is the Vice President of Business Development at Elastic and leads the team responsible for Elastic's partner relationships, including channel partners, system integrators, OEMs, and strategic alliances. Prior to Elastic, Craig was part of the portfolio operating team at Silver Lake Partners. He spent over 10 years at Cisco as a senior leader in Cisco M&A and investments group, leading OEM operations, and as a director of product management in data center switching. He also was a consultant with McKinsey & Co and a development engineer at Tektronix. Craig earned a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Justin Hoffman is Senior Vice President of Sales for Elastic, where he is responsible for advancing the company's sales strategy, customer success initiatives, and growing the customer base. Justin brings more than 15 years of technology sales and executive management experience to Elastic. Over the last 10 years, Justin held numerous leadership positions with VMware, delivering world-class virtual infrastructure, end-user computing, and management solutions to the Global 2000, Emerging Markets, and Public Sectors. Most recently, Justin led Global Field Operations for VMware's Applications business that included Zimbra, the leading open source collaboration platform built for the Post-PC era, and Socialcast, the enterprise social networking platform that connects people to knowledge, ideas, and resources. Previously, Justin was an Account Manager for Inktomi, a leading provider of Internet and Intranet Search technologies. Justin holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from Saint Mary's College of California.

Marty Messer is a 20-year veteran of the open source world, and has spent that time in roles helping customers get significant value from free software. As Vice President of Customer Care at Elastic, Marty is responsible for support, training, and consulting, ensuring the success and satisfaction of our customers. Over the many similar roles he's held at Red Hat, Hyperic, SpringSource, and VMware, Marty has built globally dispersed, highly skilled, and exceptionally professional teams that met or often exceeded the high expectations his customers demanded and deserved. Since joining Elastic in April 2014, his mission is to repeat that success.

Robin Sharpe is Vice President of Operations for Elastic, responsible for systems, reporting and control of the Elastic Professional Services Organization. Robin has more than fifteen years experience in senior financial executive roles in technology-focused businesses, including IBM and startups such as SpringSource. Previously, he was Vice President of Finance for Talend, a company that provides data integration solutions on an open source-based platform. Robin is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales, having trained with Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers).

Uri Boness has over 12 years of open source Enterprise Java experience, many of which dedicated and focused on Apache Lucene related technologies. An active Apache Lucene community member, often with contributions to various open source projects in the Apache Lucene ecosystem. A consistent promoter and advocate of open source technologies and the founder of the Dutch Apache Lucene User Group. Previously, Uri served as the head of the search department at Orange11, where he helped drive and secure Orange11′s position as an internationally renowned leader in open source search technologies.

Simon Willnauer is an Apache Lucene core committer and Apache Software Foundation Member. He has been involved with Apache Lucene since 2006 and has contributed to several other open source projects within and outside the Apache Software Foundation. During the last couple of years he led the design and implementation of numerous scalable software systems and search infrastructures. His main interests are performance optimizations and concurrency. Simon is also a co-founder of the highly regarded BerlinBuzzwords conference on Scalability in Berlin (Germany).