Company

Running SolidFire

Dave Wright, Founder and CEO

Dave-110x110.jpgDave Wright left Stanford in 1998 to help start GameSpy Industries, a leader in online videogame media, technology, and software. While at GameSpy, Dave led the team that created a backend infrastructure powering thousands of games and millions of gamers. GameSpy merged with IGN Entertainment in 2004 to create one of the largest Internet gaming & entertainment media companies.  Dave served as Chief Architect for IGN and lead technology integration with FIM / MySpace after IGN was acquired by NewsCorp in 2005.

In 2007 Dave founded Jungle Disk, a pioneer and early leader in cloud-based storage and backup solutions for consumers and businesses.  Jungle Disk was acquired by leading cloud provider Rackspace in 2008 and Dave worked closely with the Rackspace Cloud division to build a cloud platform supporting tens of thousands of customers. In December 2009 Dave left Rackspace to start SolidFire.

Jay Prassl, VP of Marketing

Jay-110x110.jpgJay Prassl is leading the marketing efforts at SolidFire. Prior to SolidFire, Prassl was employee number five at LeftHand Networks, where he spent the last 10 years breaking new ground in the storage market with the company's distributed SAN solution. He led multiple parts of the LeftHand business through its acquisition by HP, and was most recently responsible for the management of the full HP/LeftHand product line in Canada, U.S., and Latin America. Prassl earned a bachelor of science degree from Michigan State University.

Mark Glasgow, VP of Worldwide Sales

Mark-110x110.jpgMark joins SolidFire as the head of worldwide sales bringing more than 20 years of sales and sales management experience within the data storage and enterprise computing markets. Before joining SolidFire, Mark lead sales at Xiotech for more than 6 years where he developed the sales team world wide and refocused the company's sales efforts towards performance centric solutions. Mark helped launch a totaly new storage platform and drove the sales of that new platform to a compound annual growth of nearly 80%, delivering over 5,000 units to the market within a 4 year period.  In addition to his most recent success, Mark has also been instrumental in guiding sales teams to successful exits at Talk2 Technology (acquired by PumaTech) and TenFold Corporation (acquired by DevonWay).

Adam Carter, Director of Product Management

Adam-110x110.jpgAdam Carter is an expert in storage virtualization and 10 year veteran of scale-out IP storage systems.  Adam has led product management at LeftHand Networks, HP, and VMware, bringing revolutionary products to market.  Adam pioneered the industry's first Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) at LeftHand Networks and helped establish VMware's VSA certification category.  Adam brings deep product knowledge and broad experience in the storage ecosystem to SolidFire and heads up all aspects of product development.

Jim Burglin, Director of Support and Services

Jim-110x110.jpgJim Burglin has over 25 years of experience building world-class product support and services processes, measurements, and teams capable of scaling in high-growth environments. He has held key leadership and management positions in account management, operations, product support, and professional services. Prior to SolidFire, he built a support and services team for Scale Computing, a start-up SMB storage company. His expertise was also instrumental in helping LeftHand grow their base to over 3000 customers and subsequent acquisition by HP. Prior to LeftHand, he was instrumental in helping Boulder based SignalSoft Corporation deploy the first wireless 9-1-1 location system in the US.  He holds a Bachelor of Business Computer Systems from New Mexico State University.

Ulysses Owen, Director of Software Engineering

Ulysses-110x110.JPGUlysses Owen is passionate about building world class engineering teams. He brings years of leadership experience in creating teams from the ground up, hiring key contributors, driving quality, and ensuring on time delivery. Ulysses was responsible for leading the management interface team for his previous distributed data storage company which had over 7,000 customers. With 4 previous start ups under his belt he has been a key contributor to ensuring the success and rapid growth of these fledgling enterprises. Ulysses graduated summa cum  laude with a B.S. in computer science, and has held a DOD top secret security clearance.

Havish Vinnakota, Director of Quality Assurance

Havish-110x110.JPGHavish Vinnakota oversees all aspects of SolidFire's quality assurance efforts. He is a Six Sigma certified professional with a strong track record in technical leadership and delivery of complex highly available enterprise storage solutions. In the past 8 years, Havish has held various engineering roles at LeftHand Networks and HP. Most recently, he was an architect at HP in their enterprise storage business where he led the quality efforts to deliver the industry's first bladed SAN solution. He holds a Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder and also a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Kakatiya University, India.

Tom Hartzell, Director of Operations

Tom-110x110.jpgTom has been leading operations growth engines and global supply chain partnerships for over 20 years. His expertise lies in building processes and support teams that reduce cost and increase profitability. At IBM Tom negotiated and implemented an Inventory Materials Management Support system for 1800-plus oil rig drilling operations in the Middle-East that resulted in a cost savings of $300M a year. As a Naval Officer he automated an International Air Force supply chain and directed the construction and operations of their data processing and telecommunications infrastructure.  At Rhythms NetConnections his extended supply chain team designed, assembled and installed a nationwide telecomm network of over 1400 sites in 37 cities.  Tom has produced highly organized and very successful Materials Management and Manufacturing teams at both CompuServe and Schlage Lock by implementing Lean, JIT and other highly productive concepts in materials management. Tom brings not only experience, but also a B.S degree from Penn State and a Masters from the Naval Postgraduate School.

Dave Cahill, Director of Strategic Alliances

Cahill-110x110.jpgDave comes to SolidFire with 10 years of experience in, and around the enterprise storage industry. Prior to SolidFire, Dave was the founder of Diligence Technology Advisors, a strategy consulting practice focused on emerging enterprise technologies. Starting his career at EMC, he was an early member of the Centera business unit. After EMC, Dave spent 6 years on Wall Street in analyst and investor capacities. While at RBC Capital Markets, he was a key contributor on one of Wall Street's top equity research teams in storage. At SolidFire Dave is charged with heading up the company's strategic alliance efforts.

Derek Kraus, Director of Finance

Derek-110x110.jpgDerek brings more than 15 years of financial management experience to SolidFire across an array of industries - including computer manufacturing, real estate, online higher-education, online marketing, and software - where he managed the finance, HR, operations, legal and administrative functions.  He brings a deep understanding of how to successfully grow organizations, having grown 3 other firms to as many as 400+ employees.  For the past 8 years, he has worked for venture-backed technology firms and assisted in raising over $15 million in equity.  Derek earned a bachelor-of-science degree in business and technology development from Montana Tech, and successful completion of the CPA (CPA-inactive status).