Management Team

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.

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.

Peter Galvin

Chief Marketing Officer

Peter Galvin leads Proofpoint’s global corporate and product marketing initiatives. Prior to joining Proofpoint, Mr. Galvin was the senior vice president of marketing and products at Openwave Corporation. In that role, he executed a new marketing strategy to reposition the company as the core supplier for mobile applications and infrastructure and helped generate over $300 million in annual revenue. Previously, he served as vice president of marketing at Celequest Corporation (acquired by Cognos) and the vice president and general manager at Inktomi Corporation (acquired by Yahoo!). Galvin holds an MBA in marketing and Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Clark University.

Wade Chambers

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.

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

Executive 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.

Jay Kane

Vice President, North America Sales

Jay Kane joined Proofpoint from Oakley Networks / Raytheon Intelligence & Information Systems where he was VP of Worldwide Sales and built a field sales organization that grew sales from the company's inception to $25 million in 3 years, with approximately 60% coming from Federal and 40% from accounts such as Wal-Mart, Bank of America and Best Buy. Prior to Oakley Networks, Mr. Kane was VP of North American Sales for Crossbeam Systems, VP of the East for NetScreen and Director of Service Provider and North East Enterprise Sales for Nortel / Bay Networks. In these roles Jay built sales organizations and channels to scale North American sales to the $100M per year level. He holds a BS in Marketing from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Andrés Kohn

Vice President, Technology & Product Management

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. In addition, 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