Steve Mullaney brings 30 years of marketing, product management, and engineering experience in network infrastructure and security to Aviatrix. Most recently, Steve was the CEO of Nicira Inc., a network virtualization and software-defined networking company, from 2009 until it was acquired in 2012 by VMware for $1.26 billion. Nicira invented the concept of offering software-based services running on top of networking hardware. Mullaney became the senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Networking and Security business unit following Nicira’s acquisition.

Prior to Nicira, he served as vice president, marketing, and interim CEO for Palo Alto Networks. During his tenure, Mullaney oversaw the company’s invention of the next-generation firewall market category, which helped cement Palo Alto Networks’ reputation as a thought leader and cybersecurity innovator.

Steve also held executive positions at Blue Coat, Force10, Cisco, Growth Networks, ShoreTel, Bay Networks and SynOptics, and began his career as a design engineer at GTE Government Systems. Steve holds a BSEE from the University of Rhode Island.

John Jendricks serves as the Chief Operating 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).

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.

Michael Welts brings 30 years of experience building global brands across a wide spectrum of technology companies, ranging from venture-backed startups to publicly traded global market leaders. Michael has served in executive roles for companies at all stages of growth from seed/pre-revenue to hypergrowth, IPO and turnarounds. Most recently, Michael was a founding employee and CMO of Wasabi Technologies, a disruptive cloud storage company named one of the world’s fastest growing technology companies. Wasabi reinvented cloud storage by creating the “hot cloud storage” category, a one-size-fits-all solution that simplified data storage and dramatically reduced costs.

Prior to Wasabi, he served as vice president, marketing for Plexxi (acquired by HP). Over the course of his career, Michael has held executive positions at Colubris Networks (acquired by HP), Castle Networks (acquired by Siemens), Bay Networks (acquired by Northern Telecom) and Cabletron Systems (Publicly traded, NYSE). During his various tenures, Michael oversaw the creation of dozens of market categories and breakthrough technologies including the introduction of the 10BASE-T standard that revolutionized networking. Michael holds a BA in Mass Communications from Western Illinois University.

Joshua Blatt brings more than 20 years of programming and management experience in networking and software engineering. Before joining Aviatrix, Josh was at Google where he managed Istio’s core team, and also led multiple community working groups and participated as a voting member in Istio’s TOC. In this role, he launched GCP’s managed Istio offering – Anthos Service Mesh. Prior to Istio, Josh managed Google’s Linux Kernel Networking team where he was responsible for optimizing and hardening both established and emerging Internet protocols, as well as the end host components of Google’s internal traffic shaping infrastructure.

Prior to Google, Josh managed Yahoo’s CDN organization where he evolved its CDN into a multi-region cache hierarchy capable of serving many terabits per second. He led multiple infrastructure teams to replace Yahoo’s original LAMP stack with NodeJS and Java, and helped build out the company’s CI/CD infrastructure.

As a programmer, Josh specialized in C/C++ UNIX-based L3-L7 networking and security intermediaries and components, with a variety of positions ranging across early stage startups and larger companies. Josh was originally self-taught, entering the industry with a BA in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He subsequently earned a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign while employed as a full-time programmer.

Lillian Leaños, SPHR serves as the Chief People Officer for Aviatrix. Lillian brings 20+ years of Human Resources and People Operations experience. For the past 7 years she has served as a CPO Consultant for Countsy providing venture-backed technology start-ups with HR outsourcing solutions. Prior to her role at Countsy she was the Vice President, Operations, People & Culture for Accretive Solutions, where she led the development of consistent and supportive employee and organizational initiatives.

Lillian is passionate about building a high-performance culture and teams that align with the goals of the organization. Lillian also enjoys spending her free time with regular exercise, family, engaging in sports, music and a good book.