If you follow enterprise technology, then you know that there are certain household names that everybody knows by now. Like Aaron Levie, the 29-year-old-wunderkind CEO of Box, and Marc Benioff, the battle tested veteran CEO of salesforce.com.
Here are some rising stars who you may not know – yet. Each is doing his/her part to positively impact the future of enterprise technology and all are simultaneously raising the bar at their respective organization.
Together, these enterprise technology entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate executives have raised tens of million dollars in venture capital, have had hundred million dollar exits, and have managed hundreds of million dollars in assets.
Editor’s Note: This list was not compiled by anyone on the AlleyWatch staff, and is presented in no particular order…
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Zach Hamed (Age 21), Co-Founder of Bowery.io
With a track record enviable by any standard, Zach is currently taking a sabbatical from his undergraduate Computer Science degree at Harvard as a Thiel Fellow to work on Bowery.io – an enterprise development environment. A prolific writer, his previous work experience includes Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Rough Draft Ventures, Jawbone, and Allen & Company.
Taylor Gould (27), VP of Marketing at BetterCloud
Starting his enterprise technology career as the 24th employee and 1st marketing hire at Cloud Sherpas (currently 900 employees with $100 million annual revenue), Taylor now leads all marketing and lead generation at BetterCloud. Guiding BetterCloud’s content marketing efforts, including the #1 resource site in the Google Apps ecosystem (googlegooru.com), Taylor has played an integral role in BetterCloud’s growth from an 8 to 70+ person team, with 18 million users across 30,000 customers.
Tracy Takemura (27), Vice President, Technology Business Development at Morgan Stanley
Tracy is a member of Morgan Stanley’s TechBD team, which connects, develops and strengthens technology relationships across the Firm and its clients. This includes the technology, banking, equities, and wealth management organizations as well as technology vendors, venture capital and private equity firms. In this role, she plays an integral part in identifying emerging market trends, helping vet and onboard enterprise startups’ technology offerings, and managing relationships with strategic technology vendors – no small feat for a company with $1.9 trillion in client assets, 56,000 employees, and almost $37 billion in revenue.
Brian Saplicki (28), Finance and Operations at Bitly
After 4 years working at Viacom, Brian left the corporate world to join Bitly in February of 2013. He now leads Bitly’s Finance and Operations teams, focusing on driving revenue growth and effectively scaling the organization – no small feat for a startup with $29 million in funding.
David Eisenberg (29) and Judy He (29), Co-founders of Floored
Floored may only be 18 months old, but David and Judy have done an impressive job solving a difficult technical and business problem for the real estate industry by providing interactive, online 3D models of open listings. On track to generate well into 7 figures of revenue this year, having raised $5.25 million from RRE and Greycroft, and having grown to a team of around 35 people, Floored is one of the most promising and exciting early stage enterprise technology companies in NYC.
Emily Williams (26), Senior Product Manager at Infor
Despite her young age, Emily has played an integral role at Infor – an almost $3 billion software company and the world’s third largest provider of business applications and services. Noticing the lack of design and social collaboration tools in traditional business software, Emily set out conceptualizing, developing, and launching Infor Ming.le – a social collaboration platform and one of the marquee applications of Infor’s latest generation of product release, Infor 10x.
Michael Nutt (Age 29), Co-founder and CTO of Movable Ink
Michael is no stranger to handling complex technical problems at massive scale. Prior to co-founding Movable Ink and leading the engineering efforts behind one of the most innovative email marketing tools in the market today that enables companies to send dynamic content and counts Dow Jones, Electronic Arts, Hyatt, and Freshdirect among others as clients, Michael was a senior software engineer at Gilt Groupe and Limewire.
Noah Brier (32) and James Gross (32), Co-founders of Percolate
Noah and James are building a powerful content marketing tool for Fortune 500 customers. Already working with huge brands and retailers such as General Electric, Unilever, MasterCard, and Diageo – and having just raised a $24 million round from Sequoia Capital – Noah and James are on a mission to help the world’s largest companies create content at scale.
Meghan Gill (29), Director of Marketing at MongoDB
As the 8th employee and first non-engineering hire at MongoDB, Meghan has played an integral role in driving the mainstream adoption and building the developer community behind the world’s most popular open-source NoSQL database. Downloaded over 7 million times and powering the backend of companies such as Metlife, ADP, Telefonica among many more, MongoDB is currently the highest valued startup in New York City at $1.2 billion dollars.
Ben Sesser (29), Director of Corporate Strategy and Development at Sailthru
Helping guide the helm of Sailthru, one of New York City’s most promising growth stage companies with $48 million raised from the likes of RRE Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Scale Venture Partners and AOL Ventures, Ben has been active in the enterprise technology community as an InSite Fellow, a Board Member of Tech@NYU, and with strong thought leadership on enterprise technology such as Memo to this year’s YC class: It’s damn hard to build an enterprise company.
Greg Smithies (29), Associate at Battery Ventures
Greg is an associate at Battery Ventures, a venture capital and private equity fund with $5 billion raised since its inception and investments in segment leading companies such as Marketo, ExactTarget, and Akamai. Greg focuses on investments in Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Mobile and Infrastructure, and is always on the lookout for people applying next-gen technologies to solve old-world “boring” enterprise problems (supply-chain can be sexy.) He is involved with various enterprise portfolio companies including Nutanix, SingleHop, Primary Data, Vivid Cortex, Interana, Entelo, and Appneta.
Charlie Robbins (29), Founder and CEO at Nodejitsu
With an impressive technical background as a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and as Technology Director of General Assembly, Charlie now runs Nodejitsu – providing essential application and code management infrastructure for Node.js. As if running a company wasn’t enough, Charlie is also the curator of the EmpireJS conference in New York City.
Jeff Seibert (28), Director of Mobile Platform at Twitter
With three successful companies already under his belt, Jeff is an impressive founder by any measure. Creating Arios Software in high school before attending Stanford, he went on to build Increo, serving as its COO and Lead Architect until its acquisition by Box in 2009. Most recently, Jeff co-founded Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter in 2013 for $100+ million in stock – now worth significantly more), where he stayed on as Director of Engineering before recently moving into the role of Director of Mobile Platform.
Eric Frenkiel (28) and Nikita Shamgunov (35), Co-founders of MemSQL
Graduates of Facebook, Eric and Nikita are on a mission to bring real-time analytics to the world’s largest organizations. MemSQL helps companies quickly query big data and adapt to changing business conditions, and they have the backing to prove it – most recently a $35 million Series B round from Accel, Khosla, First Round, and Data Collective.
James Tamplin (29) and Andrew Lee (29), Co-founders of Firebase
Having picked up more than $7 million in venture funding from top-notch firms such as Flybridge, Union Square Ventures, Greylock, and NEA, this tag team power-duo co-founded Firebase in 2011 to change the way the world builds software. Firebase allows developers to build powerful, modern apps with only frontend code by hosting a cloud-based, real time backend.
Daniel Lewis (28) and Nik Reed (33), Co-founders of Ravel Law
Frustrated with the current state of legal technology, these two Stanford Law School graduates teamed up to build Ravel, a new platform that turns case law into insights, with search visualizations, data-driven analytics, and competitive intelligence. Raising $9 million dollars from NEA and North Bridge to take on the likes of WestLaw and LexisNexis, these two co-founders are poised to transform the legal industry.
Daniel Nadler (30) and Pete Kruskall (27), Co-founders of Kensho
Daniel and Pete have made performing sophisticated quantitative analyses as easy as typing in a question to Google thanks to their virtual market research assistant Warren. They aim to empower financial professionals to perform sophisticated empirical analyses in a fraction of the time spent by institutional research teams today. They’ve recruited a team which includes veterans of Google and Apple, the former CIO of Credit Suisse, and a three time International Olympiad in Informatics world champion, among others. Daniel is a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve, and Pete was previously a software engineer at Google and Kayak.com.
Amit Mukherjee (26), Associate at NEA
For the past two years, Amit has been working on deals at NEA that now account for almost a billion dollars in market value, including enterprise tech investments such as Appian, Duolingo, Pentaho, Sonatype, and most recently, TrackMaven. Before joining NEA, Amit was an analyst on JP Morgan’s Internet & Digital Media investment team, where he worked on over $37 billion worth of financial transactions.
Joe Floyd (30), Investor at Emergence Capital Partners
Joe is a prestigious Kauffman Fellow and investor at Emergence – a venture fund that focuses exclusively on enterprise SaaS and cloud business applications and has invested in cloud market leaders including Salesforce, Yammer, Box, and Veeva Systems. Joe earned his stripes at American Capital, a $20 billion private equity firm, where he was responsible for sourcing, executing, and monitoring seven late stage technology investments including HomeAway. He has published thought leadership on enterprise technology in TechCrunch and VentureBeat, among other publications.
Cecilia Haig (25), OneCloud Program Manager at Box
Cecilia serves as the Product and Program Manager of OneCloud, overseeing Box’s entire partner ecosystem of mobile apps that integrate with their enterprise cloud content management service. Focusing on the next generation of mobile enterprise software, Cecilia has been instrumental in the growth of OneCloud from just 30 apps in April 2012 to more than 1,000 apps today.
K Young (34), CEO and Co-founder of Mortar Data
As the CEO and Co-founder of Mortar Data – a Boston TechStars alum – K has built an open-source, big data platform used by the Associated Press, Shapeways, Stubhub, and Viacom among others. Prior to creating Mortar Data, he was a software architect at Amplify Education (acquired for $400 million), where he helped build their three flagship products – TPRI, DIBELS, and ARIS – which together have a reach of over 5 million people.
Author’s note: Ravel Law and Kensho are Work-Bench Ventures investments, and Mortar Data and Nodejitsu are Work-Bench member companies.
