Leadership
Doug Merritt
Chief Executive Officer
Leadership bio
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Doug Merritt
Chief Executive Officer
Doug Merritt is Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and President of Aviatrix. Most recently, Doug served as Splunk President and CEO from 2015 to 2021. During his tenure as CEO, Doug led the transformation of Splunk from an on premise, perpetual license software company with the equivalent of $220 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), to a cloud-based SaaS company with ARR of $3.12 billion. In his first year at Splunk, Doug served as the Senior Vice President of Splunk’s go-to-market functions including sales, marketing, support, business development, partners, and other customer facing functions.
Prior to joining Splunk, Doug served as Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions Marketing at Cisco from 2012 to 2014. From 2011 to 2012, he served as CEO of Baynote, a behavioral personalization and marketing technology company. From 2005 to 2011, Doug served as President of Products and Technology as well as a number of other executive roles and as a member of the extended Executive Board at SAP A.G. Among other accomplishments, during his tenure at SAP, he and his team developed and launched the GRC set of solutions for SAP, growing from zero to over $800m in license sales over a five year period. From 2001 to 2004, he served as Group Vice President and General Manager of the $1b+ in revenue Human Capital Management Product Division at PeopleSoft Inc. (acquired by Oracle Corporation) where he led the functional teams focused on engineering, product management and marketing, support and GTM overlay. He also co-founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Icarian, Inc. (since acquired by Workstream Corp.), a cloud-based company, from 1996 to 2001.
Doug holds a B.S. from The University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.
John Donnelly
Chief Revenue Officer
Leadership bio
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John Donnelly
Chief Revenue Officer
With an eye for spotting industry innovators, John Donnelly has led sales at some of tech’s hottest startups on their way to acquisition and IPO. As Chief Revenue Officer at Aviatrix, Donnelly draws on over 30 years of experience driving revenue growth for data security and cloud infrastructure leaders.
Throughout his career, Donnelly has consistently identified companies poised for rapid growth and market dominance. He’s led sales at multiple startups that went on to be acquired, including CloudKnox (acquired by Microsoft), Vontu (acquired by Symantec), and TalkingBlocks (acquired by HP). He’s also been instrumental in ramping revenue at pre-IPO juggernauts like MobileIron, Kana, and NetGravity.
Leveraging his keen instincts and bold leadership, Donnelly develops strategies that catapult revenue and cement market share. With an impressive track record of spotting winners early and driving them to exit, he’s now focused on leading Aviatrix’s revenue engine.
Cyrous Jamé
Chief Financial Officer
Leadership bio
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Cyrous Jamé
Chief Financial Officer
Cyrous Jamé is the Chief Financial Officer of Aviatrix, bringing 15 years of Finance leadership experience with a deep understanding of technology. Prior to Aviatrix, Cyrous spent 10 years at Google, most recently, leading the Strategic Finance team of Google Play. Also at Google he has held finance leadership positions across Ads, Media, and Consumer Hardware divisions. Prior to Google, he spent several years working on Wall Street as a Software and Internet technology analyst and investor. He started his career as a software engineer developing complex enterprise software applications.
Cyrous holds Bachelor’s degrees in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from University California Berkeley, and a Masters in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
Leadership bio
John Jendricks
Chief Information Officer
John Jendricks serves as the Chief Information Officer for Aviatrix. Formerly Chief of staff for VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger, Jendricks initially joined VMware six years ago as vice president, business development and operations, alongside the Nicira acquisition. He has over 35 years of technology experience in driving innovative technologies to become industry-leading products.
Prior to joining VMware, Jendricks was responsible for business & commercial operations as Vice President, business development and operations at Nicira, Inc. Jendricks also spent many years as CIO in the industry, leading technology implementation at Adobe, Wellfleet (acquired by Synoptics), Juniper Networks and StrataCom (acquired by Cisco).
Brian Kocsy
Chief Customer Officer
Leadership bio
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Brian Kocsy
Chief Customer Officer
Brian Kocsy is the Chief Customer Officer at Aviatrix, overseeing Aviatrix’s Processional Services, Support, and Embedded Engineering teams. Brian is responsible for growing the organization’s capabilities and customer-first culture, placing Aviatrix customers at the forefront of every business decision. Brian brings over two decades of experience in customer success and post sales, including developing and managing world-class customer success, services, support, and renewal organizations for SaaS and on-premises software companies.
Having held leadership positions across Engineering, Product Management, and Professional Services, Brian brings an uncommon perspective to ensure our customers succeed with Aviatrix. Putting yourself “in the shoes of the customer” and taking a problem/solution approach is the cornerstone of any successful business.
From being a founding team member to being acquired by Microsoft and leading key Bing Search teams, Brian has experienced every stage of company building. Most recently, Brian transformed and scaled HashiCorp’s customer success and architecture teams from $100M through IPO and built and scaled DataStax’s customer success and renewal teams from $80M to $140M.
Sandeep Singh Kohli
Chief Marketing Officer
Leadership bio
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Sandeep Singh Kohli
Chief Marketing Officer
Sandeep is an accomplished and modern marketing leader with over 25 years of experience in building high-performing teams. As Aviatrix’s Chief Marketing Officer, Sandeep is responsible for all global marketing initiatives for the company.
Prior to joining Aviatrix, Sandeep led worldwide marketing at Venafi for over three years, ultimately leading to an acquisition by CyberArk. At Kong, Sandeep set up and scaled the company’s marketing program from early stage to hyper growth. Prior to Kong, he led global platform marketing at MuleSoft through its successful IPO. Sandeep has also held leadership roles at Piston Cloud (led acquisition to Cisco), Brocade, Cisco Systems, Nortel and Lucent.
Sandeep holds an MBA degree with Honors from UC Berkeley, with a specialization in marketing and strategy, and an Engineering degree with Honors from Bombay University, with a specialization in Electronics and Telecommunications.
Scott Leatherman
Chief of Staff
Leadership bio
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Scott Leatherman
Chief of Staff
Scott Leatherman is an award-winning full-stack marketing and operations executive with 25+ years of leadership and business management experience. Scott is currently the Chief of Staff for the oCEO at Aviatrix. Prior to joining Aviatrix, he was the CMO at Veritone, an AI platform company. Scott served as COO at SAP Labs US for 5 years. Scott was a Global Vice President of Marketing and was a founding member of the SAP HANA go-to-market team that disrupted the database market and built a billion-dollar business in less than three years. Also during Scott’s tenure at SAP he was part of the Strategic Account Sales Team and created new channel programs to reduce shelfware and support new solution adoption. Prior to SAP, Scott held senior marketing and business development roles at several startups.
Scott was recognized by the Silicon Valley Business Journal for his lifelong commitment to helping his local community with the 2018 Individual Community Champion Award. Both at work and in his personal life, Scott is focused on helping communities reduce food insecurities, supporting underserved children, funding cancer research and Native American educational programs.
Chris McHenry
Vice President of Product Management
Leadership bio
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Chris McHenry
Vice President of Product Management
Chris McHenry is Vice President of Product Management at Aviatrix, where he helps customers solve the new and unique challenges of networking within and between multiple clouds. He is an expert in multicloud networking, cloud cost management, zero trust networking, and microsegmentation.
Prior to Aviatrix, Chris spent more than 14 years at Cisco, where he led a global team of technical solutions architects responsible for Cisco’s cloud networking and security software portfolios.
Chris has unique experience driving innovation and disruption at large companies and enjoys being on the leading edge of major market transitions.
Anirban Sengupta
Chief Technology Officer
Leadership bio
![](https://aviatrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Anirban_Sengupta.jpg)
Anirban Sengupta
Chief Technology Officer
Anirban Sengupta is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Engineering at Aviatrix, bringing in over three decades of engineering and management leadership experience. Most recently, Anirban served as Senior Director of Engineering at Google, driving Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) management and security services and Anthos engineering. During his tenure at Google, Anirban helped grow Anthos business from inception to more than $200M Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). He also launched GKE Enterprise offering an integrated container platform.
Prior to joining Google, Anirban served as Vice President of Engineering – NSBU at VMware. In this role, Anirban built out the NSX networking and security portfolio including NSX Edge, Distributed Firewall and NSX Intelligence products. Before VMware, Anirban held leadership roles at Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies, Ascend Communications, among others.
Anirban holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India and M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University, California.
Varsha Vig
Chief Human Resources Officer
Leadership bio
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Varsha Vig
Chief Human Resources Officer
Varsha Vig is our Chief Human Resources Officer, focused on cultivating a culture of excellence and innovation at Aviatrix. Varsha brings over 12 years of experience in implementing and designing strategic HR programs which enhance employee experience and help drive business results. Prior to Aviatrix, Varsha was VP of Total Rewards, Talent & Diversity at Paxos, led the People function at Ready Responders, and held talent development leadership roles at other high-growth organizations such as Blink Health, Compass and Lyft.
Varsha started out her career in tax accounting focused on helping companies support their global talent through effective Global Mobility programs. She shifted her focus to building HR programs when she was at McDonald’s Corporation by leading their global mobility and broad-based compensation programs.
Varsha holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting from University of Texas at Arlington and a Masters of Science in Taxation from George Washington University. She is also a CPA and Certified Compensation Professional.
Meet the Board
Board
Members
![](https://aviatrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/member-3@2x-1.png)
Devdutt Yellurkar | Partner, CRV
Since joining CRV in 2008, Devdutt has pioneered the firm’s investments in the next generation of Cloud and SaaS companies. He brings the experience of building two high-growth tech companies. Prior to joining CRV, Devdutt was the co-founder and CEO of Yantra, a leading eCommerce technology company that was acquired by a division of AT&T. Prior to that, Devdutt was SVP Sales & Marketing at Infosys, leading them from a small startup of $1million in sales to a highly successful public company.
![](https://aviatrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/member-2@2x-1.png)
Nick Sturiale | Managing Partner, Ignition Partners
Nick Sturiale has served on the board of directors of Aviatrix since February 2015. Nick is a managing partner at Ignition Partners and oversees the Los Altos office. He spent 12 years as an entrepreneur in three startups where he held most all functional roles from QA to product management to channel sales to marketing and BD. He was founding CEO and director of Timbre Technologies. As a VC the last 15 years, Nick has been directly involved in over 100 startups and invested across multiple platform generations from applications to Web/cloud infrastructure to mobile enterprise to Big Data. To date, Nick’s companies have generated nearly $700m in realized value from approximately $100m in investment cost.
Nick has a chocolate Labradoodle named Koa, which means brave, bold, and fearless in Hawaiian.
![](https://aviatrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/member-1@2x-1.png)
Shirish Sathaye | General Partner, Formation 8
Shirish Sathaye has served on the board of directions of Aviatrix since February 2015. Shirish is a General Partner at Formation 8, where he focuses on investments in next-generation enterprise software, cloud- based software, wireless and wireline networking, storage infrastructure and systems. Prior to joining Formation 8, Shirish was a General Partner at Khosla Ventures between Oct 2010 and Nov 2013. Before that, Shirish spent nearly a decade as a General Partner at Matrix Partners, between 2001 and 2010. Some of Shirish’s investments include Aruba Networks (NASDAQ:ARUN), Nutanix, Grandis (acquired by Samsung), Solidcore Systems (acq. by McAfee), Panzura, Kumu Networks, and Vectra Networks.
![](https://aviatrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/GeneralCatalystLogo2.png)
Quentin Clark | Managing Director
Quentin is a Managing Director at General Catalyst. Most recently, Quentin was CTO of Dropbox, and was integral to taking the company public, leading the engineering, product, design, and growth teams throughout the process. Prior to Dropbox, Quentin spent nearly two decades with Microsoft, starting as a software engineer, then product manager, and eventually leading the entire family of data products. After Microsoft, Quentin joined SAP and helped to build the company’s growth strategy, first as their CTO, then leading strategy, corpdev, M&A and strategic partnerships.
![](https://aviatrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/TCV_Logo_Blue_RGB-v2-1024x534.jpg)
Tim McAdam | General Partner, TCV
Tim joined TCV in 2010 and focuses on investments in the enterprise software, security, and tech-enabled services markets. His current investments include FinancialForce, GitLab, OneTrust, Oversight, and Vectra. His prior investments include Alarm.com (NASDAQ: ALRM), Avalara (NYSE: AVLR), Rapid7 (NASDAQ: RPD), Silver Peak (acquired by HPE), Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) and TOA Technologies (acquired by Oracle).
Tim was previously a partner at Trinity Ventures, a leading early- to mid-stage venture capital firm, where he focused on investments in the software and security sectors. Prior to Trinity, Tim was a vice president at GTCR in Chicago. He started his career in the early 1990s at TA Associates in Boston.