David Friend is the co-founder and CEO of Wasabi, a revolutionary cloud storage company. David’s 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 ThirdKind.Friend 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 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 — has to 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 & 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. He was honored as a 2018 BBJ CFO of the Year.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.

“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.“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.”

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.

Laurie is an experienced partner marketing leader with a 20+ year track record of launching and scaling channel programs 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) as well as most recently driving 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 launch and 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.

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.

Mark joined Wasabi in 2022 and plans on expanding upon 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 in a number of start ups 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 studying 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.

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. Her focus has been on 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. Some of those solutions included 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 degree in English from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

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 to 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 GoToMarket strategy at Wasabi and helped launch the Reserved Capacity program.  She 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; 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.  

Vin brings in 25+ years of experience in Engineering and Operations. At Wasabi, he is responsible for all of Wasabi’s global data centers. He has held leadership roles in early stage start ups, 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 loves hiking, biking and Tennis.

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. He 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. He 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.

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, active and passive monitoring of fixed and mobile networks, big data analytics, network security, threat detection and mitigation, deep packet inspection, 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. 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 the 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.

Today, Whit is building out Wasabi’s technology partner ecosystem and driving the adoption of the company’s hot cloud storage service in the Media & Entertainment sector.

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

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. Before Actifio, John was 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 from startup phase through IPO and the ultimate sale of the business to Oracle. John received BS and MS degrees in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a MBA from Southern New Hampshire University. John and his wife reside in New Hampshire where they enjoy golfing, boating, and skiing.

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. Most notably she 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 brands trademark. As part of the trademark education campaign at Velcro Companies, Julie developed and launched the award winning, viral campaign ‘Don’t Say Velcro”. Prior to Velcro Companies, Julie was in the luxury diamond market working for Hearts On Fire where she spearheaded brand activations with Victoria’s Secret and Godiva.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 has launched a disruptive video marketing campaign that’s generated over 5 million views.

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.

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.  He also 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 had experience with Sophos where he opened up distribution and CDW. Prior companies also include Symantec (Veritas) and Computer Associates.

Product marketer by profession, technologist by accident, curious by nature David translates complex technology into simple compelling values that resonates with customers. As Wasabi’s Vice President of Cloud Strategy, he plays an integral role in communicating their mission of making data storage simple, affordable, 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.

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. Prior to Wasabi, Vilas helped build the Partner Engineering function from ground up, at Acme Packet (acquired by Oracle). He has deep experience in building and nurturing high performing, cross functional teams. At Wasabi, Vilas was the founding member of the Partner engineering team, 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, Partner management teams focused on developing innovative partner products and launching and scaling the Channel business.

Vilas is trained as an engineer and holds a BS in Computer science from Rivier University & Masters in telecommunications from Northeastern University( Boston). He lives in Boston, MA with his wife and kids, and enjoys playing basketball and going on long bike rides with the family.

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. King spent time in Autodesk where he was responsible for the Channel business for Asia-Pacific. Prior to that King has been the President and Representative director of Citrix Systems Japan for seven years. Previous roles that King also held were senior sales management roles at companies including, Borland, Software, Gartner Group and Sterling Software.King graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration of Marketing, Transportation and Logistics.

Jon Howes leads sales in the EMEA region. Jon 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. Jon has particular 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 North Western University, USA. In 2019 Jon was named a ‘Channel Chief’ by CRN. Outside of the office Jon is a passionate cyclist and sailor and volunteers as a mentor for several non profits in technology education. Jon is based out of Switzerland but previously lived in Italy for many years, and still misses the food.