David Friend is the co-founder and CEO of Wasabi, the hot cloud storage company. Wasabi marks David’s sixth company founded alongside Wasabi CTO Jeff Flowers. His first company, ARP Instruments, developed synthesizers used by Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and even helped Steven Spielberg communicate with aliens, providing that legendary five-note communication in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. David founded or co-founded five other companies: Computer Pictures Corporation – an early player in computer graphics, Pilot Software – a company that pioneered multidimensional databases for crunching large amounts of customer data, Faxnet – which became the world’s largest provider of fax-to-email services, Sonexis – a VoIP conferencing company, and immediately prior to Wasabi, what is now one of the world’s leading cloud backup companies, Carbonite. 

David is a respected philanthropist and is on the board of Berklee College of Music, where there is a concert hall named in his honor and serves as president of the board of Boston Baroque, an orchestra and chorus that has received 7 Grammy nominations. An avid mineral and gem collector, he donated Friend Gem and Mineral Hall at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. 

David graduated from Yale University and attended the Princeton University Graduate School of Engineering where he was a David Sarnoff Fellow.