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.

Sherry Wei was inspired to start Aviatrix in 2013 after a long career at Cisco. The idea behind the technology was to extend the enterprise datacenter to AWS without touching the underlying network infrastructure. Aviatrix was able to acquire a couple of enterprise customers using its hybrid cloud solution before receiving funding.

Sherry worked at Cisco for 13 years. She led and developed multiple Cisco first generation products, among them the first Intel-based Cisco Integrated System Router (ISR) and the first Cisco T1/E1 Voice and WAN Interface Module.Sherry joined Cisco as part of the acquisition of Ardent Communications where she was the first employee and wrote a significant amount of code. Prior to Ardent, Sherry was an early employee at Centillion Networks that was acquired by Bay Networks (Nortel). Sherry holds a Ph.D from Purdue University in EECS.

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 deep understand of technology. Prior to Aviatrix, Cyrous spent 10 years at Google. Most recently, leading the Strategic Finance team of Google Play, and also 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 degrees in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from University California Berkeley and 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 partcipated 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.

Nauman Mustafa is an experienced, “Technology Change Agent” who is passionate about adoption and expansion of cutting edge and disruptive technologies into modern businesses. With deep roots in Networking and Security, Nauman brings over 19 years of industry experience across Cisco, Nicira/VMware and Alcatel. He is well known to build top talent Solutions Architecture teams and mastermind execution of key initiatives that challenges the status quo and brings a fresh mindset. With strong focus on Human empowerment, Nauman has led several strategic initiatives around customer product expansion, modernization of solution architectures, partner mentoring, field enablement and new idea incubation.

Prior to joining Aviatrix, Nauman was a Director & Global Technology Adoption leader at VMware. In this role, he was instrumental in driving their Networking, Security and Cloud Native Portfolio from ground up to multi-billion dollar ‘likeable’ products. Before VMware, Nauman held several management and technical leadership roles at Cisco with focus on success of various voice/video, data center and cloud solutions.

Nauman holds a M.S Degree in EECS from SIUE as well as industry certifications CCIE, VCDX-NV and most recently ACE in Multi-Cloud domain.

Deepesh is an experienced leader with over 20 years of experience in service provider and enterprise networking with extensive experience in the areas of Cloud Services, datacenter networking and operations and mobile networking. Deepesh has built out several customer facing teams focused on network design and architecture, day 2 operations, support and DevOps within high growth startup environments.

Prior to Aviatrix, Deepesh served as the Director of Customer engineering at Uhana (acquired by VMware in 2019) where he managed an SRE team to design and deploy Uhana’s next generation wireless networks platform, harnessing the power of SDN, machine learning and predictive analytics to manage and optimize mobile networks for large Service Providers in the US, Europe and ANZ regions. Before Uhana, Deepesh was part of the Solutions Architect team at Nicira Inc. until its acquisition by VMware in 2012 and continued to lead a team of Solutions Architects in VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit before joining Uhana. Prior to Nicira, Deepesh served as a technical lead in customer focused teams at Juniper and Tellabs.

Raghu is a proven industry leader with over 20 years of experience in the field of data networking and security and is passionate about customer success. Over the years, Raghu has a track record of building and scaling highly effective technical support teams and positioning them for success.

Prior to Aviatrix, Raghu was Director of Advanced Services for one of the leading service provider verticals at Juniper Networks and was instrumental in growing services revenue by 4x. Prior to Juniper, Raghu has held several technical leadership roles at Wichorus, Tellabs Inc and WIltel communications spanning Network Architecture, Engineering and Professional Services.

Raghu holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tulsa and a certificate in Product Management from UC Berkeley.

Don Leone is Vice President of Business Development at Aviatrix, bringing over 30 years of proven sales and sales leadership experience to the role. Prior to this role, Don led the planning and execution of Aviatrix’s international sales strategy, establishing a customer base in all global markets. Prior to Aviatrix, Don was a sales leader at HP Enterprise Services (now DXC) leading Fortune 500 enterprises on their digital transformation and cloud migration strategy. He also has over 20 years of experience at Siemens with roles that included Director of Global Accounts and Director of Cloud Computing, helping the company transition from legacy voice technologies to Voice-over-IP.

Don has also held executive sales roles at startups United Messaging and Hosting.com. He holds a Social Sciences degree with an emphasis in International Business from UC Berkeley.

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.