Leadership Team

Bob has more than 25 years of high technology experience. Until an acquisition by IBM in 2008, Bob served as chairman, CEO, and president of Transitive Corporation, the worldwide leader in cross-platform virtualization with over 20 million users. Previously, he was president and CEO of Tality Corporation, the worldwide leader in electronic design services, whose revenues and size grew to almost $200 million and had 1,500 worldwide employees. Bob held several executive general management positions at Cadence Design Systems, Inc., an electronic design automation company, which he joined in 1985 as an early stage start-up and helped to grow to more than $1.5 billion during his 13 years at the company. Bob also headed High Level Design Systems, a successful electronic design automation start-up that was acquired by Cadence in 1996. Bob has extensive board experience having served on both public (Certicom, HLDS) and private company boards (Snaketech, Tality, Transitive, FanfareGroup).

Damien Katz is the creator of Apache CouchDB and co-founder of CouchOne, which merged with Membase to form Couchbase. He began his developer life working on Lotus Notes for Iris Associates, acquired by IBM. With a number of patents under his belt and broad acknowledgement of the superior sync capabilities of Notes, Damien set out to create a new kind of database better suited to the needs of web and cloud computing. In 2005 he stated he was working on a "storage system for a large scale object database" and called it CouchDB (Cluster Of Unreliable Commodity Hardware). In 2008, it became a top-level Apache project maintained at the Apache Software Foundation. In 2009, Damien, along with J. Chris Anderson and Jan Lehnardt, founded CouchOne.

Yaseen is senior vice president of product development for Couchbase, responsible for advancing the company's NoSQL technology leadership, including the company's flagship NoSQL database offering, Couchbase Server. Prior to joining Couchbase, Yaseen served as vice president of engineering at Oracle Corporation where he led the development of Core Fusion CRM frameworks, including the Fusion CRM SaaS programming model for extensibility; the mobile, Outlook and predictive analytics frameworks; the contact center framework; and the Customer Center and Order Management applications. Prior to Oracle, Yaseen held executive engineering positions at SAP, Siebel and CMGI/AdForce. As a vice president at SAP, Yaseen led the technical and strategic direction for SAP’s Next Generation Architecture and Platform working in the office of the CTO. Prior to that, Yaseen led the development of Siebel’s BPM frameworks including workflow architecture and platform, rule engines and tools and compilers for scripting languages. At CMGI/AdForce, Yaseen was vice president of engineering, leading the development of the ad management and targeting frameworks. In a previous stint at Oracle, Yaseen also served as principal technical staff and was an original team member on the first release of Advanced Queuing (AQ) on Oracle 8i. Yaseen holds six technical patents spanning the areas of database, workflow and mobile focused on platforms and frameworks. Yaseen earned a Ph.D. (EE/CSE) from the University of Florida, specializing in database systems.

Ravi Mayuram is responsible for product development and delivery of Couchbase NoSQL offerings. He comes to Couchbase from Oracle where he was a senior director of engineering leading innovations in the areas of recommender systems and social graph, search and analytics, and lightweight client frameworks. He was also responsible for kickstarting the cloud collaboration platform. Previously in his career, Ravi has held senior technical and management positions at BEA, Siebel, Informix and HP in addition to couple of start ups including BroadBand office, a Kleiner Perkins funded venture. Ravi holds a MS in Mathematics from University of Delhi.

Sharon has more than 15 years of experience developing infrastructure software and leading software development teams, having built and managed world-class engineering teams at large companies and start-ups alike. Sharon joined Couchbase from Yahoo, where he was director of engineering, responsible for the development of Yahoo’s Real Time Targeting platform, which processes billions of events daily. Prior to Yahoo, he led the server development team at AppStream, a provider of on-demand software distribution and virtualization (acquired by Symantec). Before AppStream, Sharon drove engineering efforts at early stage start-ups in the areas of messaging and CTI. Sharon holds a degree in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from San Jose State University.

Steven brings 15 years of software sales management and business development experience to Couchbase. Most recently, Steven served as vice president of worldwide sales at Transitive, the leading cross-platform virtualization software company. At Transitive, Steven successfully built the direct and OEM business which culminated in a profitable acquisition by IBM in 2009. Previously, Steven was director of sales at Cadence Design Systems Inc., a leading electronic design automation software company, where he was responsible for managing a $75 million software product and services business.

Frank Weigel is responsible for all field technical operations at Couchbase. Frank is passionate about working with customers and users to understand emerging requirements and successfully driving disruptive technology solutions to market. Previous to Couchbase, Frank was with IBM as technical product manager for cross-platform virtualization. Prior to that Frank served in a variety of roles at Transitive, including R&D, product management, and sales engineering. Frank received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer engineering from Manchester University, and holds several U.S. patents.

Melinda brings 20 years of enterprise software marketing experience to Couchbase. Previously, she was senior director of product marketing at VMware, where she launched the company’s line of virtualization management and cloud automation solutions. She joined VMware in 2006 when the company acquired Akimbi Systems, where she was vice president of marketing. Prior to Akimbi, Melinda held marketing leadership roles with high technology companies including Informix Software (acquired by IBM), Brio Technology (acquired by Hyperion), Actional Corporation (acquired by Progress), and Rightworks (acquired by i2). Melinda holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BA from the University of New Mexico.

Frank Artale was most recently Group Vice President, Business Development at Citrix Systems. He has over 26 years of experience in the software industry and was responsible for all aspects of Citrix’s business development with software and hardware technology partners. Frank joined Citrix from XenSource where he was responsible for strategic marketing and business development. Prior to XenSource, Artale was a founder and CEO of Consera Software, a management software company, which was acquired by HP in 2004. Before founding Consera, Frank was Vice President of the Windows Solutions Group for VERITAS Software, where he oversaw overall product strategy of the Windows targeted solutions. He also held the position of General Manager In the Windows 2000 Group at Microsoft Corporation, one of the many and varied product management and sales positions he held during his nine-year career with the company. Frank attended Polytechnic Institute of New York as a Board of Trustees Scholar where he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Kevin joined Accel in 2003. His background is primarily as an entrepreneur and operating executive. He served two stints as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers where he started Corio, an ASP/SaaS pioneer which went public on Nasdaq and was acquired by IBM in 2005. Later he built and served as the first CEO of IronPlanet, an online marketplace for heavy equipment with current annual gross sales over $500M. Prior to KPCB, Kevin worked at Zip2 and Bain & Company. Kevin focuses primarily on two areas for investment: consumer internet services and SaaS/open source software. Within consumer services, he sourced Accel’s investment in Facebook, and led Accel's investments in Groupon, Tumri, RAMP, Metacafe, Medio Systems, and Mig33. Within SaaS/open source software, he led investments or serves on the boards of Xensource (acquired by Citrix for $500M), Genius, SpringSource (acquired by VMWare for $420M), Terracotta, Aptana, and Couchbase. He also served on the board of BBN Technologies (acquired by Raytheon). Kevin has an MSEE, BSEE, and BA in Economics all from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was an Arjay Miller scholar.

Paul Santinelli joined the team at North Bridge Venture Partners in 2005, focusing on investments in open source, software, security, internet applications and infrastructure and communications. Previously, he served as director of Red Hat Network and was responsible for product definition, strategy, engineering, product management, marketing and lifecycle management for the company’s flagship software services offering. Paul also served as the director of global information systems and technology during his tenure at Red Hat. Prior to Red Hat, Paul was founder and CEO of NOCpulse, Inc., a Silicon Valley software startup focused on delivering the next generation enterprise systems management platform (acquired by Red Hat in October 2002). While at NOCpulse, Paul was nominated for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2002. Before founding NOCpulse, Paul was chief technology officer of Global Center and vice president of technology for Global Crossing, a telecommunications company that built and operated the world’s first independent global fiber optic network. During the past 12 years, Paul has held various engineering, product management and marketing positions in companies including Red Hat, IBM, Lotus Development and Compuware. Prior to North Bridge, Paul served on the advisory boards of Arrowpoint Communications (acquired by Cisco), Inflow, Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape), Mobility.net (acquired by Software.com) and One Secure (acquired by Netscreen). Paul received a BS from Emerson College in Boston.

Robin is a software entrepreneur and investor. He invests in cloud computing applications, open source, virtualization, and security sectors in enterprise software. Prior to joining Mayfield in 1999, Robin was a founder and/or key member of several successful software startups including CATS Software, Infinity Financial Technology, acquired by SunGard (SDS) and Risk Management Solutions. Robin earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.A.S. dual degree in industrial engineering and economics from Stanford University.

Josh Berkus is primarily known as one of the Core Team of the world-spanning open source database project PostgreSQL. He is CEO of PostgreSQL Experts, Inc., and has also worked with many other relational and non-relational database systems. He is heavily involved in many OSS communities, and advises several companies, such as Actuate Corporation, on open source strategy. Josh became involved with CouchDB because of his interest in government open data.

Roy Fielding is known for his pioneering work on the World Wide Web, open source, and software architecture. He wrote the standards for HTTP and URI, defined a bit of HTML, and has been a contributor to many other Web technologies. Roy was among the first elected members of the W3C Technical Architecture Group. His doctoral dissertation defines the REST architectural style as a model for the design principles behind the modern Web architecture. Roy is also one of the founders of the Apache HTTP Server Project, incorporator and first chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, and a current member of the ASF board of directors. He has been honored with the 1999 ACM Software System Award, the OSCON 2000 Appaloosa Award for Vision, the 2010 ICSE Most Influential Paper, and as a member of the first MIT Technology Review TR100. Roy works as a Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems Inc. Prior to Adobe, he was Chief Scientist at Day Software, a leading provider of enterprise content management software which was acquired by Adobe in 2010. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.

Richard Hipp is the architect and primary author of SQLite, an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. He and his wife, Ginger G. Wyrick, currently live and work in Charlotte, North Carolina for their company Hipp, Wyrick & Company, Inc., or “Hwaci”. Richard graduated from Georgia Tech in 1984 with a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. He worked at AT&T for three years before returning to graduate school at Duke University. Richard earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Duke in 1992.

Robert Johnson is Director of Engineering at Facebook, where he leads the software development efforts to cost-effectively scale Facebook’s infrastructure and optimize performance for its many millions of users. During his time with the company, the number of users has expanded by more than fifty-fold and Facebook now handles billions of page views a day. Robert was previously at ActiveVideo Networks where he led the distributed systems and set-top software development teams. He has worked in a wide variety of engineering roles from robotics to embedded systems to web software. He received a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech.

Cadir oversees the development and innovation of Zynga’s technology platform and large-scale infrastructures. He manages the analytics, network operations, security, and India operations team. Before joining Zynga, he spent 11 years as the CTO of Support.com, an online technology support company he co-founded with Zynga founder Mark Pincus. Prior to that, he spent two years as an engineering consultant for Hewlett Packard. Cadir got his start as an entry-level programmer at SpaceWorks, a technology company in Washington, D.C. Cadir earned his bachelor’s degree in biology and music and graduated with honors and distinction at Stanford University.

Matt Ocko has over 25 years of experience as a technology entrepreneur, operating executive, and venture capitalist, during which he has actively helped create over $10 billion in fully realized shareholder value. Matt joined Sevin Rosen Funds in 2008 as a partner after serving as a venture partner, and was previously a partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners and a founding general partner of Softbank Technology Ventures. During his venture capital tenure, he has invested in and served on the boards of a number of successful companies (both IPOs and majoracquisitions) including DataMirror, SupportSoft, Critical Path, Prio, Zip2, Verisign, Alantro, nDSP, UltraDNS, and 3Ware. He also helped start, personally invested in, and advised a number of venture-backed startups, including XenSource (acquired by Citrix), Akimbi (acquired by VMware), Fortinet (IPO), Zynga Game Network, Facebook, MetaWeb, PanoLogic, Market6, Aggregate Knowledge, Playlist Inc., On Ramp Wireless, and Da Vinci Systems. He holds a degree in physics from Yale University.

Michael Olson was formerly CEO of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB, the open source embedded database engine. Mike spent two years at Oracle Corporation as vice president for embedded technologies after Oracle's acquisition of Sleepycat in 2006. Prior to joining Sleepycat, Mike held technical and business roles at database vendors Britton Lee, Illustra Information Technologies and Informix Software. Mike has Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

In Sik Rhee brings 18 years of experience as an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor across a broad spectrum of technology enabled markets. Prior to joining Rembrandt, In Sik spent two years as a venture partner at Accel Partners. There he helped identify new investment opportunities and served as an advisor or board member to various portfolio companies. As an entrepreneur, In Sik co-founded two successful venture-backed companies: he was a co-founder and chief tactician at Opsware, which was acquired Hewlett Packard for US$1.6 billion in 2007; and co-founder of Kiva Software Corporation, a pioneer of the application server middleware market acquired by Netscape Communications in 1997 for $180 million. In Sik holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, where he also serves on the Executive Advisory Board for the College of Engineering and the Advisory Board for the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He has authored two books: High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug with over 2 million downloads. He also created Cuzillion, SpriteMe, and Browserscope. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O'Reilly and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo! He worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo! Prior to this, Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere? and Lycos. He received a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.