Mike Gustafson / Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board

Mike Gustafson joined Virident in September 2012 as CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors. He is responsible for setting the strategic direction of the company and leading the executive team across all operational aspects of planning and execution.

Mr. Gustafson was most recently with Hitachi Data Systems an Enterprise Storage Solutions Company where he was SVP and GM of the File & Content Business following the acquisition of BlueArc Corporation in September 2011. The product portfolio he led offered integrated hardware and software solutions to help customers manage unstructured data growth and was the foundation for company strategy for big data. He served as president and CEO of BlueArc Corporation from 2005 until the acquisition of the company in September 2011. There he led a team that built the company over 7 years into a top 3 market share player in the Enterprise Network Attached Storage (NAS) market. He has more than 20 years of experience in the storage, server, networking systems and IT industries.

Prior to BlueArc, Mr. Gustafson was senior vice president at McData an enterprise SAN company, from 1998 – 2004 and was responsible for worldwide sales, services and marketing. He was a key member of the leadership team that led the McData initial public offering, global sales expansion and partnership strategy development. He helped McData gain industry-leading share in the enterprise storage area network (SAN) market, growing annual revenues to more than US$400 million. Prior to McData, he worked at IBM from 1989 – 1998 in multiple roles including direct and channel sales of high volume compute, server and connectivity products for various divisions and geographies.

He is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis - John M Olin School of Business.

Kumar Ganapathy, Ph.D. / Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder

A recognized leader in DSP, wireless and computing systems architecture, Dr. Ganapathy has years of leadership experience as an operating executive and entrepreneur in the high technology field. Prior to founding Virident in 2006, Dr. Ganapathy was an Executive in Residence (EIR) at Artiman Ventures. Before that, he was the Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of VxTel, developer of VoIP DSP processors and subsystems, which was acquired by Intel in 2001. At Intel, Dr. Ganapathy was Director of Architecture and Engineering in Ultrawideband Networking Operation (UWB) and Edge Access Division (VoIP, 3G BTS) as well as in the CTO Office of the Intel Communication Group. Before co-founding VxTel, Dr. Ganapathy was Principal Engineer and Fellow of Conexant and Rockwell Semiconductor leading the development of 56-kbit modems and GSM phones.

Dr. Ganapathy holds a Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras where he received the prestigious Siemens Gold Medal. He received his Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Dr. Ganapathy has published over a dozen papers and has been issued sixteen patents.

Vijay Karamcheti, Ph.D. / Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder

Dr. Karamcheti has over 15 years of experience in designing and developing technologies at the leading edge of parallel and distributed computer systems architecture, middleware, and application frameworks.

From 1998 through 2009, Dr. Karamcheti was a member of the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, most recently holding the position of Associate Professor with tenure. Dr. Karamcheti led the Parallel and Distributed Systems group and conducted research in the area of high-performance cluster and grid computing. Dr. Karamcheti also spent a sabbatical year as a Visiting Research Scientist at Google, Inc. as part of the core Systems Infrastructure team, gaining a deeper understanding of the opportunities and challenges of massive web scale-out system infrastructures.

Dr. Karamcheti received his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, India, and his master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Bruce Horn / Chief Financial Officer

Bruce Horn is responsible for managing the administrative, financial, and risk management operations of Virident, including the development of financial and operational strategy and metrics tied to that strategy, helping to transition the company from its high-growth startup phase to a mature structured entity. He brings to this position more than 30 years of accounting, finance, and management experience with public and private high-technology companies. Prior to joining Virident, Mr. Horn was CFO at Akros Silicon, Signet Solar and StrataLight Communications. Prior to StrataLight, he held the position of CFO and treasurer at Oplink Communications, Inc., which he joined and took public in 2000 raising over $280 million. Prior to Oplink Mr. Horn was CFO and VP of finance at Larscom, Inc., which he took public in 1996 raising over $95 million.

Mr. Horn has a BA in accounting from the University of Northern Iowa and a MBA in finance from California State University.

Keith Carpenter / Vice President Sales, Americas

Mr. Carpenter has been in sales and sales leadership positions in the information technology market since 1993, primarily focused on enterprise storage and application delivery. Most recently, he was co-founder and Vice President of Sales for Cache IQ, an early stage start-up developing Flash based technologies with sophisticated software for accelerating I/O demanding applications. Cache IQ was acquired by NetApp in November 2012. Prior, he was the VP Sales for Storspeed, a private start-up based in Austin, Texas. Before that, Mr. Carpenter had been with NetApp since 2001, most recently as a Sales Director responsible for a $220M business unit in the Central US. He has also held sales and leadership positions with Auspex Systems and EMC Corporation.

Mr. Carpenter received his BBA of Finance and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin.

Eric Taborek / Vice President Sales, High Growth and Emerging Markets

Mr. Taborek has considerable international sales & marketing experience holding senior positions in Tokyo-Japan, Taipei-Taiwan, and then in Hong Kong as Director of Asia Pacific Operations for AMD. In 1996, Mr. Taborek held the position of Vice President of Sales for Smart Modular Technologies, which after several years of rapid growth and geographic expansion was acquired by Solectron for $2.2B. After the acquisition of Smart Modular, Mr. Taborek was appointed General Manager of Force Computer Services Division and Executive Vice President of Force Computer Worldwide Sales, headquartered in Munich, Germany.

Mr. Taborek joined the startup VxTel, the leader in DSP solutions for the emerging VoIP market, building the Sales and Applications Engineering team and winning key designs leading to VxTel being acquired by Intel for $550M. While at Intel, after transitioning from the VoIP Business Development, Taborek became a member of Intel’s Strategic Accounts Sales organization responsible for all aspects of the technical and business relationships between Intel and Cisco Systems. Mr. Taborek also has experience as Vice President of Sales for GainSpan Corporation, an Intel Capital backed embedded Wi-Fi company, and as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Chelsio Communications, a leader in 10Gigabit Ethernet technology, targeting the converged storage and high performance server market.

Mr. Taborek received BS degree from University of California, Berkeley, and MBA from University of Michigan.

 

Carl Munio / Vice President, Operations

Mr. Munio has over 30 years experience in manufacturing and operations engineering. He has participated in multiple successful startups, developing, staffing and ramping complex product lines with strict quality requirements. Prior to joining Virident, Mr. Munio was Sr. Director in charge of Value Add Operations for Bell Microproducts. Prior to that he was VP, Operations for SMTC California where he managed board assembly and instrument builds for OEM customers in global positioning systems and network acceleration. Before SMTC, Mr. Munio was President of Antares Microsystems, specializing in secure network products for the military, data storage controllers and internet accelerators. He has held a variety of executive positions for leading technology companies including Sun Microsystems and HP.

Mr. Munio has been featured in several studies for developing organizational structures to manage high volume product ramps and models for accelerating and screening failures in electrical components. He received his undergraduate degree in Electronics Technology from the College of San Mateo.

 

Sunil Samel / Vice President, Strategic Partnerships

Mr. Samel is responsible for establishing and managing engagements with Virident’s strategic partners. Earlier at Virident, he has also been responsible for product management and early customer wins.

Mr.Samel has over 20 years of experience spanning software, semiconductor and storage markets, and securing early wins with lighthouse customers in multiple geographies – Europe, Asia-Pacific and the US.

Before Virident, Mr. Samel was co-founder at CoWare (acquired by Synopsys) and at Six-F Systems. The CoWare technology came out of his work with a research team at IMEC Belgium, which pioneered the system level design methodology and integrated software tools for designing complex system-on-chips (SoCs). Six-F Systems was a fabless semi startup developing SoCs with a novel hardware-software architecture for concurrent, multi-standard mobile communications. Earlier, he worked with TCS, India on several projects with technology leaders like Philips Belgium, Bell Northern Research and Bell Labs.

Mr. Samel holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Institute of Technology, BHU, India and a Master’s degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

 

Jean Okawaki / Vice President, Human Resources

Ms. Okawaki joined Virident in January 2013 and is responsible for building and leading the human resources effort in support of Virident’s operations worldwide. She has more than 18 years of management and human resource development experience at both private and public companies, and has established a successful track record of creating, implementing and directing innovative human resource initiatives for rapidly growing, high technology companies.

Ms. Okawaki was most recently the Vice President of Global Human Resources at BlueArc Corporation, a leader in scalable, high performance network attached storage with offices in North America, Europe, and Australia. Prior to BlueArc, she led the global human resources effort at Maple Optical Systems, a networking system company with offices in North America and Europe; and before that, led the human resources effort at Chela Financial Resources, a secondary education finance company with more than $2.1 billion in student loan assets. She began her HR career managing the human resources function for the California branch offices of Salomon Brothers, a global investment banking and securities firm.

Ms. Okawaki completed the Human Resources Management Program at San Francisco State University; is an active member of the Society of Human Resource Professionals; and holds Senior Professional HR and Global Professional HR certifications.

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