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. 

Jeff Flowers is the co-founder and CTO of Wasabi. Together with David Friend he has started, built and sold five successful technology companies. Most recently, they co-founded Carbonite, one of the world’s leading cloud backup companies. Carbonite backs up hundreds of millions of new files every day using technology that Jeff and David’s team created. It was their shared vision for a next generation cloud storage architecture that gave birth to Wasabi hot cloud storage. Jeff holds an M.S. and a B.S. in information and computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology. 

“All the world’s data — photos, movies, medical images, genomes, IoT, you name it — must get stored somewhere and nobody, including the Big 3, is doing a particularly good job at it. It’s a simple product, a simple business model, and really simple pricing. Everyone needs to store data, so everyone is a potential Wasabi customer. What an amazing opportunity!” says Flowers. 

Jeff is on the Board of Trustees of the Walnut Hill School, an arts high school that is a feeder to Julliard, the New England Conservatory, the Boston Ballet, and other top arts institutions. 

Marty leads all global revenue-generating roles including sales, channels and alliances. In addition, Marty works with engineering, operations, product management and customer support as a single unified team focused on building, managing, selling and supporting our world class cloud storage service. Marty brings 25+ years of customer-facing experience in sales and business development to this world class team. He has been fortunate to be a part of some great companies from early-stage start-ups to rapidly growing midsize companies, to top 5 technology industry titans. In his career, he has held leadership roles at Lotus (now IBM), PictureTel (now Polycom), and Cisco. Most recently, Marty served as the SVP of Sales & Business Development for Skreens (a video start-up based near Boston). Over the prior 10 years, he held leadership, sales and business development roles at Oracle, Acme Packet, and Covergence. 

Customers and partners love the simplicity of paying for only the storage that they consume with no vendor lock-in and no hidden charges. The Wasabi team is working to deliver this innovative storage service to thousands of customers and partners worldwide through our continued growth. 

Marty and his family live near the ocean south of Boston where he enjoys golf, walking to the picturesque harbor and relaxing on one of the many beautiful nearby town beaches. 

Michael joined the Wasabi team after spending 25+ years in various finance, operations, technology and business development roles, primarily for venture-backed technology and clean tech companies. His most recent role was at iZotope Inc. where he served as the CFO. Prior to that, he managed the IPO for MotherNature.com and acquisitions for LightChip and Revivio. Michael co-founded RPM Communications, where he led the launch of a 100,000-user mobile social network.  

A chartered financial analyst, Michael is on the Steering Committee of The CFO Leadership Council and a frequent speaker and organizer of panels for CFOs and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and other financial publications. As an adjunct lecturer at Babson College, Michael teaches corporate finance to both graduate and undergraduate students. Michael holds an MBA from Cornell University and a BS from Babson College (finance and investments), and he previously studied computer science and economics at Brandeis University. He was honored as a 2018 CFO of the Year from the Boston Business Journal. 

“The explosion of machine learning and artificial intelligence will be built on big data, and the promise of progress on all these fronts will be fueled by cost effective, ubiquitous high-performance storage. Wasabi is leading the delivery of cloud storage to meet these needs, and I’m excited to be a part of this incredible team.” 

Jim leads Wasabi’s product management, sales engineering, and customer support efforts. As a veteran of multiple startups and large enterprise organizations, Jim has deep experience in developing, delivering, and supporting products and services that provide security, scalability, and reliability to customers and partners. Prior to Wasabi, Jim served in product management and sales/support engineering roles at Oracle (via Acme Packet and Covergence), Ciena (via WaveSmith Networks), Lucent Technologies (via Ascend Communications and Cascade Communications) and GTE. Jim holds a BSEE from Northeastern University and an MBA from Babson College. Outside of Wasabi, Jim tries (usually unsuccessfully) to improve his tennis and basketball games as well as driving / fixing (typically the latter) old Volkswagen buses. 

“The growth of storage needs in all industry verticals is a tremendous opportunity that is driving Wasabi’s success. With our innovative file system architecture and world-class product development and customer success team, Wasabi is in a unique position to be a true disruptor in cloud storage economics and performance.”

Michael Welts is Wasabi’s Chief Marketing Officer and a member of the company’s early founding team. Alongside the company’s memorable and fun name, he helped to create the “hot cloud storage” category, a revolutionary approach that simplifies data storage and its cost for businesses worldwide. Michael drives the company’s global marketing strategy and integrated marketing programs across brand, corporate communications, growth marketing, events and customer marketing. 

Michael brings 30+ years of experience building global brands across a wide spectrum of high-growth technology companies, ranging from venture-backed startups to publicly traded global market leaders. He has held executive roles for companies at all stages of growth from seed/pre-revenue to hypergrowth, IPO and turnarounds, including Aviatrix Systems, Plexxi and Colubris Networks (both acquired by Hewlett-Packard), 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. 

In addition to mentoring and advising numerous early-stage ventures, Michael serves as an Executive Committee Member of the Wasabi Fenway Bowl. He holds a BA in Mass Communications from Western Illinois University. 

Laurie is an experienced partner marketing leader with a 20+ year track record of launching and scaling channel and partner ecosystems at high growth startups such as Excel Switching (later acquired by Lucent Technologies), Acme Packet (later acquired by Oracle), and Axeda (later acquired by PTC). She most recently drove the evolution of the PTC Partner Network. Laurie’s experience boasts a wide gamut of go-to-market models including OEM, resale, managed services, two tier distribution, and co-marketing with alliance partners.  

As a seasoned partnership professional, she is passionate about the value of win-win relationships with partners that drive value, and ultimately scale their respective businesses in a way they couldn’t do alone. At Wasabi, Laurie is driving the growth of the Wasabi Partner Network, including marketing to, with and through partners, including MSPs, VARs, distributors and technology alliances who integrate or bundle Wasabi with their solutions. She is a multi-year winner of CRN’s Power 100 Women of the Channel. 

Laurie is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and outside of the office enjoys travel, cooking, biking and spending time with her husband and twin daughters. 

Pramod leads Engineering and Operations at Wasabi, responsible for delivering products and solutions. Pramod brings 25+ years of experience in a variety of domains including Telecom, Networking, Media, IoT, Cloud and SaaS software. Prior to Wasabi, Pramod led the engineering team at Spirent Communications, a leader in test and measurement products for the Cloud & IP business. Earlier, Pramod served as the Chief Technology Officer for the Consumer and Fleet Solutions at Verizon Connect. During his tenure at Verizon, Pramod led global teams that successfully deployed platforms for IoT (Thingspace) and Internet Services servicing millions of customers, FiOS Mobile App to become the mobile first experience for FiOS users, and delivered Hum, a successful, direct to consumer SaaS product. Pramod was part of the core team at Center for Development of Telematics (CDOT), India, which transformed the Indian telecom infrastructure through a suite of telecom products. He has also been part of several successful startups including Ignitus Communications acquired by Lucent Technologies and the founding VP of Engineering at Camiant acquired by Tekelec (Oracle).Pramod has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Delaware and a BSEE from University of Madras. He has eight issued patents. Pramod’s interests include travel, photography, and mentoring early-stage companies.

Vin brings 25+ years of experience in Engineering and Operations to Wasabi, where where he is responsible for all of Wasabi’s global data centers. He has held leadership roles in early-stage startups, including the one he co-founded, as well as Fortune 500 companies. Before joining Wasabi, Vin was part of Verizon, where he headed the system resiliency engineering and technical support teams. Vin is passionate about traveling and loves to explore parts of the world. He enjoys hiking, biking and tennis.

Julie is an innovative marketing executive with over 20 years of international, multi-industry experience specializing in strategic brand building and activation, communications and digital marketing. At Wasabi, Julie creates and executes strategies to deliver measurable results through highly focused leadership and empowered teamwork. Under her guidance the team has built a truly efficient inbound marketing engine and disruptive marketing campaigns that have generated over 5 million views. Julie was named to the PRNEWS Top Women in PR class of 2023 for her outside the box approach to marketing B2B technology. 

Prior to Wasabi, Julie notably led global brand and marketing initiatives for the VELCRO ® Brand where she guided the organization from a manufacturing focus to consumer-minded business while building a global corporate communications program developed to engage employees, reach key stakeholders in the media, and protect the brand’s trademark.  She developed and launched the award winning, viral campaign “Don’t Say Velcro” as part of the company’s trademark education campaign. Prior to VELCRO ® Brand, Julie was in the luxury diamond market working for Hearts On Fire, where she spearheaded brand activations with Victoria’s Secret and Godiva.  

A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Julie and her husband Erik have two daughters and love watching them perform, going on family vacations and being on the ocean or in the mountains. 

Vilas is a seasoned partner and product management leader with more than 20 years of experience building successful partner programs in hyper growth markets. He is a passionate technologist who has worked on delivering robust, secure and scalable solutions to channels and customers. At Wasabi, Vilas was the founding member of the partner engineering team, which he helped define & build a sophisticated partner and channel growth strategy. He led the initiative to streamline technology partner lifecycle management. At present, Vilas leads the product and partner management teams focused on developing innovative partner products and launching and scaling the channel business 

Prior to Wasabi, Vilas helped build the partner engineering function from the ground up at Acme Packet (acquired by Oracle). He has deep experience in building and nurturing high performing, cross functional teams. Vilas is trained as an engineer and holds a BS in computer science from Rivier University and a master’s degree in telecommunications from Northeastern University. He lives in Boston, MA with his wife and kids, and enjoys playing basketball and going on long bike rides with the family. 

Kurt has 25+ years of experience in a wide range of technical and business roles, including development engineering, product management, business development, and strategic alliances in high-growth startups, large companies, and startups that became large companies. His previous roles include CTO of Arete Advisors, SVP of Products and CTO of Fidelis Cybersecurity, VP of Product Management at Covergence, and VP and CTO of Nortel Networks EMEA. Kurt started his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories as a processor designer.  

Kurt has a master’s degree in computer, information and control engineering from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and is the primary author of two patents in the area of network security. Kurt lives in southern New Hampshire and enjoys hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing. 

Product marketer by profession, technologist by accident, curious by nature, David translates complex technology into simple, compelling values that resonate with customers. As Wasabi’s Vice President of Cloud Strategy, he plays an integral role in communicating the mission of making data storage simple, predictable, fast, and secure. He has served in various sales, marketing, and product management roles at companies at all stages of growth, from startup to Fortune 100, including NetApp, Juniper Networks, Lucent Technologies, and Cabletron Systems. 

Clark is an IT sales executive with over 25 years of technology industry experience and a proven track record of exceeding quotas while developing strategic channel partnerships. Most recently, he was Vice President of Channel Sales and Strategic Alliances at Arcserve, where he was responsible for developing MSPs, OEMs, VARs, DMRs, and alliances. Clark served as Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales at Unitrends (A Kaseya Company), where he revamped their channel sales strategy into a multi-tiered distribution model and tripled the size of the sales team. He also opened up distribution and CDW while with  Sophos, and previously worked with include Symantec (Veritas) and Computer Associates. 

With over 20 years of experience in product design and engineering, Harish is a highly accomplished engineering leader who leads the software development team at Wasabi. Harish has an impressive track record of building successful engineering teams and developing revenue generating SaaS and cloud-native products. Throughout his career, Harish has taken multiple products from concept to market in both startup and large enterprise environments. Prior to joining Wasabi, Harish served as the head of the mobility organization at Cox Automotive, where he spearheaded several flagship products and solutions. Before his time at Cox Automotive, Harish was the Director of Engineering at Verizon Telematics. During his tenure there, he was instrumental in delivering Hum, a highly successful consumer product. In addition to Verizon, Harish has also held leadership roles at publicly listed companies Sonus Networks and Motorola. 

When not working, Harish enjoys spending time with his family and exploring the great outdoors. He is an avid hiker and cyclist and loves traveling to new places.

Jonathan Howes leads sales in the EMEA region. Jonathan has a strong background in scaling EMEA indirect go-to-market models for technology companies, having previously held senior sales and channel positions in EMEA for Juniper Networks, Infovista, and Oracle. Jonathan has expertise in creating and scaling service offers with managed service providers, having successfully launched managed routing & SDWAN, application prioritization, and security offers with MSPs worldwide.  

Jon has undergraduate qualifications from Coventry University, UK and post graduate business qualifications from Northwestern University, USA. In 2019 Jon was named a “Channel Chief” by CRN. Based out of Switzerland, Jon is a passionate cyclist and sailor and volunteers as a mentor for several non-profits in technology education and still misses the food in Italy where he lived for many years.

Mark leads the quality assurance and technical documentation teams at Wasabi. As a proven technical professional and a leader with over 25 years of experience in various technologies, Mark has expertise in building and leading diverse teams across the globe that provide manual testing and automation of several areas such as, cloud storage, networking technologies, big data analytics, network security, threat detection and mitigation, and more. Prior to Wasabi, Mark led QA teams at Empirix, Arbor Networks, Quantum Bridge Communications, and Juniper Networks. Mark brings several years of experience in senior management roles devoted to off-shore QA operations, reengineering business processes and process mapping in several industry verticals.  

Mark holds an M.S. degree in computer engineering from Villanova University, PA and a B.S. (Honors) degree in EEE from NITT, University of Madras, India. 

Whit Jackson has worked at the forefront of innovation in television production and distribution for 25+ years. Today, heis building out Wasabi’s technology partner ecosystem and driving the adoption of the company’s hot cloud storage service in the media & entertainment sector. After serving in a variety of roles for several cable TV MSOs, Whit joined Hughes Communications and managed sales of Galaxy satellite services to television and radio broadcasters, while also contributing to business planning and programmer sales for DirecTV. At Macrovision (later Rovi), Whit led business units focused on video distribution security and music copy protection through the company’s successful IPO. Whit later served as VP of Business Development at SecureMedia, a pioneer in digital rights management, and worked with Hollywood studios and leading broadcasters on digital distribution, security strategy and policy. Following the acquisition of SecureMedia by Motorola, Whit was a key member of the team driving the company’s multiscreen video initiative and later directed business development for the ARRIS/Motorola AI-powered video analysis and metadata service. 

Whit holds both an MBA and an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. 

Lindsey leads the Finance Operations team at Wasabi, which is responsible for the order to cash process, sales operations & enablement, and analytics. Lindsey’s career has been focused on the order to cash process since her first job at EMC, and has continued throughout her career at RSA, Mobiquity, LogMeIn, and now Wasabi. She has focused on streamlining and improving the order to cash process through both process and system improvements. She has also been instrumental in developing the go-to-market strategy at Wasabi and helped launch the Reserved Capacity program. Lindsey strives to be a key business partner to all teams at Wasabi, but especially the sales organization.  

Lindsey is a graduate of Penn State University where she received her degree in finance and has also received her MBA from Boston College. Outside of work, she spends her time with her husband and two children and enjoys spending as much time at the beach as possible when its warm and cozying up to a big puzzle by a fire during the colder months. 

Michael King has over 25 years in the technology industry across Asia-Pacific helping companies accelerate growth. He most recently held the position of President and Representative Director of SAS Institute Japan where he led one of the largest regions for the company globally. Prior to SAS, he held various global executive management positions at Rakuten Corporation. During his tenure at Rakuten, he held various roles including CIO for the e-commerce business, GM for the data/AI organization, where he helped build the team from its infancy to one of the largest data teams in Japan, and Chief Revenue Officer of Rakuten Communications.  

Michael spent time at Autodesk where he was responsible for the channel business for Asia-Pacific. Prior to that, he served as the President and Representative Director of Citrix Systems Japan for seven years. Previous roles that Michael also held were senior sales management roles at companies including, Borland, Software, Gartner Group and Sterling Software.  

Michael graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration of marketing, transportation and logistics. 

Sue brings 20 years of sales and sales operations experience to Wasabi. Her account executive and inside sales teams manage relationships with Wasabi’s fast-growing channel partners and customers. Sue has spent her career influencing the rapid growth of emerging technologies, managing inside sales teams at early-stage startup companies, and helping those companies transition into large enterprise solutions. These include VPN technology at Altiga Networks (now Cisco Systems), RFID IoT technology at ThingMagic (now JADAK), and 802.11 wireless networking at Colubris Networks (now HPE). Sue holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. 

John is responsible for leading Wasabi’s strategic and operational initiatives in the areas of technology partner development, supply chain management, infrastructure integration and global storage region deployment. He joined Wasabi from Lytx, where he was responsible for establishing the operational model and go-to-market strategy for the global roll out of a newly acquired video telematics platform to partners globally. Prior to joining Lytx, John was VP of Operations at Actifio, where he transformed the operations function, the supply chain model and the partner technology ecosystems for predictability, leverage, and scale during a period of rapid growth. Actifio was acquired by Google and is now part of Google Cloud. John also served as VP of Manufacturing Operations at Acme Packet, where he was responsible for leading the strategic operational and supply chain activities over a twelve-year period of high growth and global expansion that spanned the entire business cycle. 

 John received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial and manufacturing engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and an MBA from Southern New Hampshire University. John and his wife reside in New Hampshire where they enjoy golfing, boating, and skiing. 

Mark joined Wasabi in 2022 to drive Wasabi’s exponential growth by building global strategic and OEM partner relationships with CSP’s, MSP’s, global system integrators and other technology/application providers. Mark has 25+ years of OEM, alliance, channel and distribution experience. He has held senior leadership positions at several startups that have each gone on to be world leaders in their fields, including Newbridge Networks (acquired by Alcatel), Unisphere (acquired by Juniper Networks), Avaya, and Acme Packet (acquired by Oracle). Mark joined Wasabi from Juniper Networks where he was heading up go-to-market for Juniper’s acquisition of 128 Technology, as well as hyperscaler co-sell business development. Mark also brings a host of international experience to the team having built out and managed teams in a number of geographical regions including southern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and North America. 

Mark is originally from Cardiff, UK where he also attended university and studied control and instrumentation system engineering. He and his family have been living in the Boston area for 15 years but previously lived in Madrid, Spain (his spiritual home). He loves to travel, Peloton, scuba dive and walk his English bulldog, Marvin.