Team

Dheeraj Pandey

Founder & CEO

Dheeraj Pandey is Co-Founder and CEO of Nutanix.
He brings over 12 years of experience working at high growth enterprise software companies. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was VP of Engineering at Aster Data where he built the engineering team from ground up, overseeing the development of multiple releases of the product. Prior to Aster Data, Dheeraj was at Oracle where he managed development of storage engine for Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata. Dheeraj holds a Masters in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Graduate Fellow, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, where he was adjudged the "Best All Rounder Among All Graduating Students in All Disciplines".

Dr. Mohit Aron

Founder & CTO

Mohit is Co-Founder and CTO of Nutanix.
He brings over 15 years of experience in building scalable, high performance distributed systems. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dr. Aron was Chief Architect at Aster Data, where he made important contributions to the design and architecture of the Aster nCluster product line. Previously, he was at Google, leading the design and development of Google File System (GFS), the software that manages data on Google's large-scale clusters. Dr. Aron holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University with a focus on distributed systems and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.

Brent Chun

Principal Engineer

Before joining Nutanix, Brent was at Aster Data, where he designed and implemented a variety of core subsystems and infrastructure for a massively-parallel distributed database for large-scale data analytics. Prior to Aster Data, he was part of the quantitative research group at Ascend Capital and part of the founding team of Arch Rock, a Berkeley-based wireless sensor network startup. Brent has also served in senior research roles at Intel Research and at the California Institute of Technology, where he performed exploratory research in large-scale parallel and distributed computing systems. Brent holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was an NSF Fellow.

Bill Culman

Vice President of Engineering

Bill has over 20 years experience building enterprise-class software and hardware products. Prior to Nutanix, Bill held senior engineering management positions at QuorumLabs, Interwoven, Cast Iron Systems, Zambeel, Vitria Technology, BEA Systems and Tandem Computers. Bill holds a BA in Quantitative Analysis/Management from University of Cincinnati and an MBA from Xavier University.

David Sangster

Vice President of Operations

David brings more than 20 years of product development, manufacturing and operations experience to the company. Most recently, he was at EMC, where he held the position of VP of Manufacturing Technology. Prior to EMC, he was VP of Operations at Data Domain (acquired by EMC in 2009) where he built out the manufacturing and supply chain capabilities to scale the company through a successful IPO in 2007. Previously, David held senior positions at Hewlett Packard and McDATA in a variety of engineering and manufacturing management positions.

David holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the MIT, an MS in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Sudheesh Nair

Vice President of Sales

Sudheesh is building a world-class sales team that understands the challenges customers face with their virtualized datacenter infrastructure. He has a deep conviction that if you listen to the customer and the broader market, and focus your business priorities accordingly, everything else falls into place. He is passionate about turning conventional wisdom of enterprise sales upside down by hiring a diverse mix of sales people and technologists who value customer trust over everything else, use social media to nurture and evangelize, and have an unparalleled commitment for software tools to innovate in sales and demand generation. Prior to joining Nutanix, Sudheesh built a strong foundation for a sales career, holding a variety of technical and sales leadership positions at IBM-XIV, DDN, ONStor and Zambeel.

Board Members

Dheeraj Pandey

Dr. Mohit Aron

Mark Leslie

Managing Director, Leslie Ventures

Mark Leslie is currently the managing director of Leslie Ventures, a private investment company. He is also a Lecturer in Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches courses in Entrepreneurship, Ethics and Sales Organization.

Mark Leslie was the founding Chairman and CEO of Veritas Software. During his tenure as CEO the company went from 12 employees to 6,000 employees deployed globally, and from a revenue base of $95,000 per year to $1,500,000,000 per year. In 2000 Veritas was the tenth largest independent software company by revenue, third largest by market capitalization, and achieved the distinction of becoming a Fortune 1000 company.

From 1980 until 1990 he served as president and chief executive officer of two Silicon Valley high- tech start up companies. Prior experience included sales management, sales executive, systems engineer, and software engineer. Mark Leslie designed and developed the first software hypervisor while employed at IBM in 1969.

Mark currently serves on the boards of a number of privately held high-technology corporations, including Librato, Liquid Robotics, Model N Software, PureStorage, SeaMicro Systems, Skybox Imaging, Sugar CRM, Wall Street Systems and Xsigo Corporation. In addition he serves on the board of Overseers for the NYU Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as Chairman of the NYU Science Advisory Board, and as a member of the Executive Board of the NYU Innovation Fund.

Mark received a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and mathematics from New York University in 1966 and completed Harvard Business School's program for management development in 1980.

Ravi Mhatre

Founder, Lightspeed Ventures

Ravi is a founder of Lightspeed and focuses primarily on software infrastructure, applications and Internet investments. He has fifteen years of venture capital experience and six years of operating experience. Before joining Lightspeed, Ravi was with Bessemer Venture Partners and invested in NetGenesis Software (NTGX), Verio (VRIO), VIA-Networks (VNWI), Webspective Software (acquired by Inktomi) and InCert Software (acquired by Geodesic).

Before entering the venture capital industry, Ravi was with Silicon Graphics, where he was a product manager and later directed the company's workstation market development efforts. Previously, he spent time in Lehman Brothers' technology investment banking group and in management consulting with Booz Allen Hamilton. Ravi began his career as a software engineer at BDIS, a Silicon Valley-based analytical instrument manufacturer.

Ravi has served on the Board of Directors for The Indus Entrepreneurs Group (TiE) in Silicon Valley, has been recognized as a Top 100 dealmaker on Forbes' Annual VC Midas List and has served as a judge for the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Competition. He holds a BS in electrical engineering, a BA in economics and an MBA from Stanford University.

Shirish Sathaye

General Partner, Khosla Ventures

Shirish Sathaye joined Khosla Ventures as a General Partner after a decade of investment experience at Matrix Partners, and a long operating career at several technology companies.  He was part of two tech companies—FORE Systems and Alteon Websystems—when they were still nascent, and led the design and development of their core products. Both companies pioneered important new product categories and had very successful IPOs.

Shirish has Ph.D in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, an MSEE from Virginia Tech, and a Bachelors Degree in Electronics Engineering from IT-BHU, Varanasi, India. He started his career at Digital Equipment Corporation first in the Semiconductor group, and then in the Network Architecture Group, spending a total of eight years at Digital Equipment Corporation. Shirish moved on to FORE Systems, where he ran Engineering for the ATM switch group. In 1997 he noticed a fundamental shift: Ethernet connections were gaining speed, eclipsing ATM. He left FORE to join Alteon Websystems, a young Ethernet switch maker backed by Matrix Partners, as its vice president of engineering and later, its chief technology officer. As the promise of the Web unfolded, Alteon began to load-balance Web servers for Internet companies. Alteon went public in 1999 and the next year sold to Nortel for $7.8 billion.

As a venture capitalist, Shirish works closely with entrepreneurs to assist them with developing and refining concepts and strategies and putting together strong teams. In some cases, Shirish will get involved very early, before the idea for the company has been fully formed. His current areas of investment focus are Wireless and Wireline Networking, CleanTech, and Cloud-based Software, Storage and Systems.

Bipul Sinha

Partner, Lightspeed Ventures

Bipul Sinha is a Partner at Lightspeed and focuses primarily on Internet, mobile and software sectors, with a particular interest in social media, digital media, social utilities/apps, advertising technology, and software infrastructure.

Previously, Bipul worked at Blumberg Capital where he led investments in digital media, Internet and datacenter software infrastructure sectors. His selected investments include DoubleVerify, Nutanix, ZipZapPlay, Mertado, Hootsuite and CarWoo. Prior to venture capital, Bipul was with Banc of America Technology Investment Banking Group where he worked on M&A and equity financing transactions. Prior to banking, Bipul was Director of database and middleware products with Oracle Corporation. Bipul also held sales and engineering positions at American Megatrends and IBM.

Bipul received his B.Tech. (Honors) in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and holds an MBA from The Wharton School where he was a Palmer Scholar. Bipul also holds several patents in distributed computing.

Advisors

David L. Schneider

Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services at ServiceNow

David Schnieder is currently an Executive-in-Residence at Greylock and NEA. He was most recently the Executive Vice President, Global Sales, EMC Backup Recovery Systems (BRS) Division which is focused on the development and delivery of next-generation disk-based backup, recovery and archive solutions. Previously he served as Senior Vice President of Sales for Data Domain, Inc., where he was responsible for driving company revenues from zero to a billion in seven years. Prior to joining Data Domain, Mr. Schneider was Vice President of Alliances, Channel and OEM sales for Borland Software Corporation. He also served as Vice President of Western United States Sales for TogetherSoft Corporation (later acquired by Borland Software Corporation). Mr. Schneider holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine.

Lane M. Bess

Chief Operating Officer, Zscaler

Lane Bess has spent over 28 years as an operational executive. He has successfully launched start-ups and scaled medium sized businesses to large scale. Most recently between 2008 and 2010, Lane was CEO of Palo Alto Networks where he led the fundraising and scaled the company from its early go-to-market to a revenue run rate of over $100 million and cash flow positive. Prior to Palo Alto Networks, he served as the EVP of Worldwide Sales and General Manager of publicly traded Trend Micro Inc. (Nikkei) - growing worldwide revenues to over $1 billion annually. 

With core strengths in Sales, Marketing and Product Management Mr. Bess has deep expertise in driving high growth for computing, network security, and software companies. His business experience includes providing critical technology solutions to Fortune 2000 companies, large enterprises, mid-size businesses, as well as consumer markets. Through continuous leverage of distribution channels, Lane has been consistently recognized as a leading "channel friendly" executive. During Lane's career he has also held senior Sales and Marketing roles at NCR Corporation and AT&T. During his time at NCR, he oversaw Multinational Corporation sales and managed large global sales divisions. At AT&T, Lane was responsible for the product launches of AT&T's Business and Consumer Internet services in the mid 90s. 

Mr. Bess holds a B.S. Degree in Managerial Economics from Carnegie Mellon University and a Masters Degree from University of Dayton.

Beth White

Former VP of Marketing, Data Domain-EMC/Independent Consultant

Beth White has over twenty years experience in worldwide marketing, product strategy and new business creation spanning server hardware, networked storage and application softwareenvironments. Beth was most recently Vice President of Marketing at EMC Backup Recovery Systems (BRS) Division.

Starting February 2006, Beth served as Vice President of Marketing at Data Domain, the leading deduplication storage company. She was a member of the Data Domain executive team that lead the company through a successful IPO in 2007, the EMC acquisition in 2009, and the formation of the BRS division (through February 2011). Before joining Data Domain, Beth was Vice President of Corporate Marketingat Aarohi Communications, an intelligent storage component provider acquired by Emulex Corporation in 2005. Prior to that she served as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Vixel Corporation, as storage switch company, where she drove marketing efforts that lead to a successful company turnaround and acquisition by Emulex Corporation in 2003. Before joining Vixel, Beth was Vice President of Product Marketing and Management at Borland Corporation, as global application and software tools company. Beth's background also includes a Senior Partner role at investment and consulting firm, Global Accelerator and 54th Street Partners, and over ten years of worldwide marketing at Hitachi Data Systems and Groupe Bull.

Beth holds a BS in Business Administration from the University of Northern Arizona.

Dr. Willy Zwaenepoel

Professor and Dean, EPFL, PhD (Stanford, 1984)

Willy Zwaenepoel is currently Professor and Dean at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. EPFL is Europe's top-ranked university in the field of Engineering, Technology and Computer Sciences. Willy Zwaenepoel has worked in a variety of aspects of operating systems and distributed systems, including microkernels, fault tolerance, parallel scientific computing on clusters of workstations, clusters for web services, and mobile computing. He is most well known for his work on the Treadmarks distributed shared memory system, which was licensed to Intel and became the basis for Intel's OpenMP cluster product. His work on high-performance software for network I/O led to the creation of iMimic Networking, Inc, which he led from 2000 to 2005. His current projects include database replication, I/O performance of virtual machines, and software update mechanisms.

Before joining EPFL in 2002, Willy Zwaenepoel was on the faculty at Rice University, where he was the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1998, and Fellow of the ACM in 2000. He won best paper awards at SigComm 1984, OSDI 1999, Usenix 2000, Usenix 2006 and Eurosys 2007. He was program chair of OSDI in 1996 and Eurosys in 2006, and general chair of Mobisys in 2004. He was also an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems from 1998 to 2002. In 2000, he also received the Rice University Graduate Student Association Teaching and Mentoring Award.

Alan Boehme

Chief of Enterprise Architecture, Business Innovation and Emerging Technologies at Coca-Cola

Alan Boehme has received worldwide acclaim for his ability to jump-start and transform global business through the innovative use of technology to enter new markets, improve customer service, and enable business-processes change across a wide range of functions. Before joining Coca-Cola, Alan has worked with a number of innovative IT organizations: Alan served as the senior vice president, IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture at ING; as the vice president and CIO for Juniper Networks; as the executive vice president and CIO for Sage Software; and as the e-technology and e-business CIO for GE Power Systems. He also held various senior positions with DHL Express.