Leadership Management Team
| Eric Hahn Founder & Chairman |
Wade Chambers Executive Vice President, Engineering |
Andrés Kohn Vice President, Technology |
| Gary Steele Chief Executive Officer |
Tom Cooper Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field Operations |
Tara Ryan Vice President, Marketing |
| Paul Auvil Chief Financial Officer |
Marcel DePaolis Chief Technical Officer |
Darren Lee Vice President, Governance and Archiving |
| David Knight Executive Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing |
Mark Fishwick Vice President, Client Services |
Michael Yang Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary |
| Tom Barsi Executive Vice President, Business Development |
Dean Hickman-Smith Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales |
Germaine Yokoyama-Heiliger Vice President, Human Resources |
Eric Hahn
Founder & Chairman
Eric Hahn is the founding partner of the Inventures Group, a leading "mentor investment" firm based in Palo Alto, California. At Inventures, Mr. Hahn has served as a director and has been actively involved with companies including Kana, Red Hat, LoudCloud, Good Technologies, and RemarQ. Previously, Mr. Hahn served as the CTO for Netscape Communications, Inc. and was a member of the company's Executive Committee. In addition, Mr. Hahn was the founder and CEO of Collabra Software, Inc., a leading groupware provider that was acquired by Netscape in 1995. Prior to Collabra, Mr. Hahn ran the cc:Mail division of Lotus Development Corporation. Mr. Hahn began his career at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, where he worked on the ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet. Mr. Hahn holds a B.S. and an honorary Ph.D. in computer science from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Gary Steele
Chief Executive Officer
Gary Steele brings a broad range of enterprise software experience to the company. Before joining Proofpoint, Mr. Steele served as the CEO of Portera, an applications company delivering solutions for the professional services industry. Under Mr. Steele's leadership, Portera raised more than $100M in capital from some of the leading venture capitalists including Kleiner Perkins, IVP, and American Express, and grew the business from its initial concept to $20M in revenue. Prior to Portera, Mr. Steele served as the vice president and general manager of the Middleware and Data Warehousing Product Group at Sybase, Inc., an organization of more than 350 people, spanning four geographies and generating $150M in revenue. In this capacity, he initiated and spearheaded all new Internet projects targeted at the enterprise. Mr. Steele's prior experience includes business development, marketing, and engineering roles at Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. He holds a B.S. degree in computer science from Washington State University.
Paul Auvil
Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Auvil brings more than 20 years of experience in finance, technology and corporate leadership to Proofpoint. Prior to joining Proofpoint, Mr. Auvil spent six months with Benchmark Capital as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, where he evaluated investments and advised portfolio companies. Prior to Benchmark, he spent four years serving as the CFO at virtualization leader VMWare, where he played an important role in helping the company to evolve from a promising start-up to one of the fastest growing companies in the history of the software industry. Previously, he served as the CFO for Vitria Technology, Inc. In that role, he executed both initial and secondary public offerings and led Vitria's acquisition of XML Solutions, Inc. Before joining Vitria, he held various executive positions at VLSI Technology, including vice president of the Internet and Secure Products Division. Mr. Auvil holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Dartmouth College, and a Master of Management degree from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University. In addition to a wealth of business experience, Auvil also holds three patents in digital video compression in Japan, and one patent (pending) in the U.S. for a high speed, PCI compatible on-chip data bus.
David Knight
Executive Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing
David Knight leads Proofpoint's global product management and marketing initiatives. He brings a wealth of large enterprise SaaS experience to Proofpoint, having previously served as CTO of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group, where he was responsible for product and technical vision and strategy, product management and user experience. Mr. Knight was previously vice president of product management for leading cloud-based conferencing and collaboration vendor WebEx Communications, where he played a central role in the company's rapid growth and eventual $3.2 billion acquisition by Cisco. Earlier he was vice president of marketing and product management for SaaS pioneer Portera Systems and an entrepreneur in residence at Institutional Venture Partners. Mr. Knight has also held executive positions at Sybase and Oracle. He holds an M.S. in industrial administration and a B.S. in information systems and industrial management from Carnegie Mellon University.
Tom Barsi
Executive Vice President, Business Development
Tom Barsi leads Proofpoint's worldwide strategic and business development efforts. Mr. Barsi brings to Proofpoint 19 years of experience in business development and general management at both public and privately-held companies. Prior to Proofpoint, Mr. Barsi served as vice president of business development for VeriSign, where he was responsible for driving strategic relationships and OEM partnership for the $400M authentication division, which was ultimately sold to Symantec for $1.2B. Previously, Mr. Barsi spent over four years as the founding CEO of ConSentry Networks, an enterprise security and networking company. While there, he raised more $70M from leading venture capital firms and grew sales to more than $10M in annual revenue. Prior to ConSentry, he served as co-founder and vice president of business development for VINA Technologies, where he drove channel and OEM partnerships and played a key role in the company's successful IPO. He started his career at Pacific Bell and holds a B.S. degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in Marketing from CSUC.
Wade Chambers
Executive Vice President, Engineering
Wade Chambers brings to Proofpoint 20 years of product development and software engineering experience in the enterprise software, Internet e-commerce and hosted services industries. Mr. Chambers was previously at Yahoo! where he served as VP of Engineering for Platforms. At Yahoo, he led the engineering organizations for a variety of entertainment and lifestyle properties which represent over 100 million unique users and billions of page views on a monthly basis. Prior to Yahoo, Mr. Chambers was VP of Engineering at Intalio, a business process management software start-up specializing in graphical programming tools for capturing and implementing business rules. Before Intalio, Wade was the VP of Engineering at Opsware where he ran all product development. Prior to Opsware, Wade held various engineering and engineering management roles at AOL/Netscape, Verity, and the White House.
Tom Cooper
Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field Operations
Tom Cooper leads Proofpoint's worldwide, customer-related activities including sales and support, with the goal of driving customer success on a global basis. A 25-year veteran within the high tech industry, Cooper has held a variety of executive management positions across sales, marketing, operations and development. Prior to Proofpoint, Cooper was Senior Vice President of the Small and Midsize (SME) organization at SAP. Before SAP, Cooper worked at JBoss, where he was responsible for the company's worldwide channel organization. He also served as President of the Americas for i2 Technologies where he oversaw all sales, consulting, support and field operations. Other management experience includes positions at Oracle, EXE Technologies and Data General.
Marcel DePaolis
Chief Technical Officer
Before coming to Proofpoint, Mr. DePaolis was the vice president of Engineering, Applications, and Operations at Webraska (formerly AirFlash, Inc.), the leading provider of location-based software and solutions, including services targeted at wireless mobile users and geospatial mapping and routing engines. Prior to AirFlash, Mr. DePaolis was with Netscape Communications/AOL, where he was technical director of Messaging and Collaboration for iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions, a Sun/Netscape alliance. Previously, Mr. DePaolis held senior architect and engineering management positions at ISOCOR; the leading supplier of Internet messaging, meta-directory software solutions, and at Quarterdeck Office Systems; developing some of the earliest consumer Internet browsers and utilities. Earlier in his career, Mr. DePaolis co-founded and held the position of CEO of Pittsburgh Powercomputing Corporation, a company that specialized in fast X Window System servers and other graphics software. Mr. DePaolis holds a triple major B.S. degree in electrical, computer, and biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Mark Fishwick
Vice President, Client Services
Mark Fishwick leads the expansion of Proofpoint's global customer service offerings while ensuring that Proofpoint customers enjoy the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Mr. Fishwick brings to Proofpoint 25 years of experience in building and running international customer service organizations. Prior to joining Proofpoint, Fishwick spent four years as vice president of client services for Postini (Google) where he was responsible for ensuring the satisfaction of Postini's more than 10 million users of Postini's SaaS email security solutions. Prior to Postini, he served as vice president of services at Blazent Inc., and managed a 200-person professional services, education and support organization for Brokat Technologies, driving $45M in annual services revenue. Prior to Brokat, he ran the worldwide services team at Blaze Software where he rapidly built and developed the customer services infrastructure as the company completed its successful initial public offering. Fishwick was also vice president of customer services for Chordiant Software and executive director for international support at Informix Corporation. Fishwick has extensive international experience, having lived and worked in Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and the Americas.
Dean Hickman-Smith
Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales
Dean Hickman-Smith oversees and drives all global sales activities for Proofpoint. He joined Proofpoint from ConSentry Networks, Inc., a computer security and networking company, where he served as vice president of worldwide sales and support. While there, he raised more than $70 million in investments and grew sales to $10 million in the first year. Prior to ConSentry, Mr. Hickman-Smith was the vice president of emerging technologies at Juniper Networks, where he spearheaded global sales of NetScreen's most recent technology acquisitions and products. He held the same title at NetScreen prior to Juniper's acquisition of the company, where he drove 100% year-over-year growth. Prior to NetScreen, he was co-founder and CEO of Congress Communications, a European sales accelerator firm for technology start-ups, whose clients included Inktomi, Arrowpoint, Ramp and Ipivot. In addition, Mr. Hickman-Smith worked on projects for the UK government and was a commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force. He graduated from Bristol Polytechnic with a degree in electronic engineering.
Andrés Kohn
Vice President, Technology
Andrés Kohn is currently responsible for Proofpoint's email archiving business unit and has been responsible for setting Proofpoint's product direction since the inception of the company. A frequent public speaker on cloud computing, IT security and compliance issues, Mr. Kohn is responsible for developing strategic technology partnerships that complement Proofpoint's solution offerings. He joined Proofpoint from Critical Path, where he was director of product management and responsible for the global direction of their messaging products and services. Before joining Critical Path, Mr. Kohn held several product marketing positions at PeopleSoft, and various management roles at International Paper as well as Procter and Gamble. Mr. Kohn holds a B.S. degree with distinction and an M.S. degree in engineering from Cornell University. He also holds an M.B.A. degree from Stanford University.
Tara Ryan
Vice President, Marketing
Tara Ryan brings to Proofpoint more than twenty years experience in managing strategic, global marketing programs for technology businesses. She leads Proofpoint's global corporate marketing and communications efforts. Prior to Proofpoint, she served as vice president of marketing for Zebra Technologies, managing the strategic development and implementation of branding, communications, websites, regional initiatives, public relations, investor relations and demand generation strategies. At Navis, SmartTurn, Ketera and NetSuite, where Ryan spent the previous 5 years, she oversaw all aspects of marketing for start-up, venture backed companies through accelerated growth and expansion phases. In addition to directing all branding, pricing, strategy and demand generation for NetSuite, she also established complete sales and marketing integration. She joined NetSuite from Deloitte Consulting, where she was a director of worldwide marketing. Earlier, she held executive marketing roles Commerce One, Network Associates and security vendor McAfee, where she lead marketing for that company's initial public offering. Ms. Ryan also led the coordination of international advertising efforts at Oracle Corporation. She holds a B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles and a M.A. from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Darren Lee
Vice President, Governance and Archiving
Mr. Lee is responsible for Proofpoint’s Information Governance business unit. Before joining Proofpoint, Mr. Lee served as the Founder and CEO of NextPage, a leading provider of Information Governance solutions. Having raised over $60M to fund various startups, Mr. Lee has vast experience in defining markets, creating products, executing acquisitions, and driving revenue to build viable businesses. Mr. Lee has been named a member of the vSpring Capital top 100 Venture Entrepreneurs for the last seven years, and he currently serves as a board member for the state of Utah's Technology Commercialization and Innovation Program. Mr. Lee holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University.
Michael Yang
Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary
Michael Yang is responsible for Proofpoint's worldwide legal affairs including licensing, intellectual property protection, compliance and corporate governance. Mr. Yang brings to Proofpoint more than 15 years of international business and legal experience at both public and privately-held companies. Prior to joining Proofpoint, Mr. Yang developed and led the corporate legal function and later the products and technology group as Associate General Counsel and Assistant Secretary of VMware, Inc., as that company grew from $200 million to over $2 billion in annual revenues. Mr. Yang has also held executive and senior management roles as an attorney for Medialive International and Openwave (as well as its predecessor, Software.com, where he contributed to that company's successful IPO and subsequent merger with Phone.com). He began his practice as an intellectual property attorney in the Los Angeles offices of Baker Hostetler. He holds an A.B. in government from Cornell University and a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law. He is admitted to practice law in the State of California.
Germaine Yokoyama-Heiliger
Vice President, Human Resources
Germaine Yokoyama-Heiliger oversees Proofpoint's global staffing and human resources needs. She brings more than 15 years of HR experience to Proofpoint with a background that includes executive and senior positions in entertainment, high-technology and Software-as-a-Service industries. Prior to joining Proofpoint, Ms. Yokoyama-Heiliger served as Production Executive and Head of Human Resources for PDI/DreamWorks Animation, managing global production staffing, casting and recruitment for the studio. Previous roles included human resources management for a variety of high technology companies including Loudcloud, Inc, Calico Commerce and Netscape Communications. She holds a B.S. in Sociology from Santa Clara University.
