Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer
Co-founder & Architect
Co-founder & Architect
Chief Revenue Officer
Chief Technology Officer
Chief Marketing Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Head of Engineering
Head of Systems Engineering
Head of Product Management
Vice President of Business Development
Brian Byun, Khosla Ventures
Dong-Su Kim, Samsung Ventures
Eric Wolford, Accel Partners
Marc Fleischmann, Datera
Nic Bellinger, Datera
Datera was founded by the authors and maintainers of the Linux I/O storage stack and is backed by Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Silicon Valley innovators Andy Bechtolsheim and Pradeep Sindhu.
Jens Axboe, Facebook
Martin Buhr, Google
Michael Dvorkin, Cisco UCS
Ken Grohe, SignNow
Steve Kleiman, NetApp
Mike Perez, OpenStack Foundation
Carl Waldspurger, VMware
Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer
Marc brings to Datera 30 years of experience building successful businesses and companies in the IT industry. He is the Co-Founder of the Open Source Business Alliance (Europe’s largest non-profit open-source ecosystem hub), Co-Founder of the Open Cloud Initiative, and has been a board member and investor in a number of high-tech companies.
Before Datera, Marc built Pixelworks H/DTV business as GM and SVP Engineering. He helped build Transmeta as Sr. Director of Software and Low-Power Programs, which went public in November 2000. He started his career as an OS and Storage Architect at Hewlett-Packard Labs.
Marc holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in business and engineering from KIT, along with a number of software and CPU patents.
Co-founder & Architect
Nic brings to Datera more than 15 years of storage product and open source software experience. He has been a prolific contributor to Linux, including the entire Linux I/O SCSI storage subsystem, which has become an industry standard and is being used by numerous tier-1 cloud and storage companies.
Before Datera, Nic was the Chief iSCSI Architect at SBEi, Inc., a company that pioneered and sold software-defined storage software solutions to large storage system enterprises.
Chief Revenue Officer
Flavio brings more than 25 years of executive management experience in the technology space. Flavio leads all revenue generating functions including sales, marketing, alliances and strategic partnerships.
Previously, Flavio was chief revenue officer at Panzura, a cloud storage company, and CEO of Syncsort, a data integration and data protection company. Prior to Syncsort, his leadership roles included serving as the EVP and co-general manager of the Engenio Storage Group at LSI, EVP and COO at Sutmyn Storage and various senior management positions with Memorex Telex in the US, UK and Italy.
Flavio holds a degree in Electronics from IX Istituto Tecnico in Milan, Italy. He has also completed the AeA/Stanford Executive Institute program for the management of high technology companies.
Head of Product Management
Ashok is responsible for product direction and strategy at Datera. Prior to joining Datera, Ashok was a key part of the product team that brought Cisco UCS to market and ran the UCS applications and cloud product teams that conceptualized the FlexPod and Cisco Analytics platforms. Ashok started his career as an I/O and OS architect in HP-UX at HP.
Ashok holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and an MSEE from the University of Arizona, Tuscon. He holds a number of patents in the IO and resource management space.
Co-founder & Architect
Claudio brings more than 20 years of distributed computing / distributed systems and storage experience to Datera.
Prior to Datera, Claudio worked as lead Engineer at OptumSoft, enhancing the super scalable platform for distributed products called TACC (powering, for example, Arista switches). He was the Network and OS Architect and a founding member of the IceCube / Seval spinout from IBM (a highly scalable, distributed storage system). Previously he worked at Transmeta on just-in-time compiler technology and IP telephony at the IBM Research center in Switzerland.
Claudio graduated from the Univeristy of Fribourg in Switzerland with a Diploma and a Doctorate in informatics on compiler and runtime optimizations in a parallel and distributed programming language.
Head of Systems Engineering
Bill leads the sales engineering team and is focused on customer success.
With more than 20 years in the storage industry, Bill has held senior positions with Nimble Storage, Seamicro and Parascale enabling him to bring a unique and broad perspective of the storage industry to Datera clients. In 2015 Bill organized the 30th anniversary event for the Amiga Computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Bill holds a BA degree from the University of Maryland, College Park where he double-majored in Decision & Information Systems and Management Science with Statistics.
Head of Engineering
Bill brings more than 30 years of experience in computing, systems and microprocessor design to Datera, where he provides overall engineering leadership and additionally serves as chief architect for the company’s high-performance data plane technology.
Before Datera, Bill served as Distinguished Engineer & Chief Architect at NVIDIA, where he led the design effort for their first internally-developed ARM v8 64-bit CPU and its coherence protocol. Previously, he held the position of Fellow & Chief Architect at Transmeta Corp., a maker of low-power x86 compatible microprocessors.
Bill earned both a Masters and PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and additionally holds bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from the same institution.
Chief Financial Officer
Eric brings more than 25 years of experience as a strategic and operational financial executive to Datera, where he oversees all company financial functions and activities.
Prior to Datera, Eric held executive positions in Finance and Operations with public and private technology companies including semiconductor maker Catalyst Semiconductor and RF amplifier maker Spectrian, Inc., as well as private ad tech companies Adchemy, Zeta Interactive and VigLink. He also served as a senior auditor with “Big Four” accounting firm EY, where he earned his CPA certification.
Eric graduated from the University of Nevada with a bachelor’s degree in accounting.
Chief Marketing Officer
Mitch brings 25 years of storage and corporate marketing experience to Datera, where he leads all company marketing activities.
Before joining Datera, Mitch was the vice president of marketing for Maxta, Inc., a software-based hyper-convergence maker. Previously, he held various executive positions including vice president of marketing and product management for big data integration software company Syncsort, Inc. and vice president of corporate marketing for storage semiconductor and systems maker LSI Corporation.
Earlier, Mitch served as the vice president of corporate communications for LSI, where he led the company’s global branding and communications activities during its multibillion dollar merger with Agere Systems. He has also held senior marketing roles with storage makers Engenio Information Technologies and EMC Corporation.
Vice President of Business Development
Rich brings to Datera more than twenty-five years of experience in business development and OEM sales for a wide range of technologies, including enterprise software, storage systems, boards, and ASICs.
Most recently, Rich was the vice president of Business Development for Catalogic Software, where he secured a sweeping strategic relationship with IBM. Previously, he served as vice president of Sales and Marketing at Proximal Data, driving its successful sale to Samsung.
His prior executive experience includes roles as vice president of OEM Sales at DataDirect Networks and vice president of Business Development and Marketing for Emulex Corporation’s Embedded Storage Products business unit.
Rich earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College.
Chief Technology Officer
Hal brings to Datera more than 20 years of experience in storage, enterprise IT and engineering. Most recently, he served as CTO and vice president of the Western Digital Data Center Business Unit, where he was charged with transforming the company from a storage device company to a systems and information management company.
Hal’s previous leadership experience includes a 16-year career with Hewlett-Packard, where he held various executive and senior level technical and engineering positions including CTO, Software-Defined Storage and CTO, Storage Area Networks. He joined Hewlett-Packard in 2002 through its merger with Compaq Computer, where he served as CTO of its multibillion-dollar Enterprise Storage Group.
Hal earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Colorado State University-Pueblo.