Board of Directors

Kelly Herrell: Chief Executive Officer, Vyatta

As CEO and member of the Board of Directors, Kelly provides the strategic leadership and vision for Vyatta and drives it through to rapid execution. Kelly has a proven track record for growing companies based on open source in the systems, embedded and telephony industries. Before joining Vyatta, Kelly was the SVP of Strategic Operations at MontaVista Software, the world's pre-eminent embedded Linux supplier, where he led the strategic focus into telecommunications equipment and mobile phones. Today operators around the world such as NTT DoCoMo have network infrastructure and tens of millions of mobile phones in use that are based on MontaVista Linux.

Prior to joining MontaVista, Kelly was Vice President of Marketing for Cobalt Networks, the dominant provider of open source-based server appliances for web hosting. After helping drive the company growth through an explosive IPO and beyond, he played a key role in driving its successful $2.3B merger with Sun Microsystems.

Previous to Cobalt, Kelly was VP of Marketing for CacheFlow (Nasdaq: BCSI), directed worldwide marketing for Oracle's database products, and served in various product- and market-focused roles at NCR, Teradata and AT&T. Kelly holds a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in Marketing from Washington State University, and an MBA from Cornell University.

Roy Thiele-Sardiña: Managing Partner, HighBAR Partners

Roy Thiele-Sardiña is a successful venture capitalist and entrepreneur with over 25 years of investment and operating experience in the technology industry. Mr. Thiele-Sardiña most recently was Managing Director at Steelpoint Capital (a spin-out of the private equity group of Moore Capital Management). He initiated the firm's infrastructure investments in storage and security.

Roy was also an Executive-In-Residence at the Mayfield Fund. He evaluated the storage and security space for the firm and initiated Mayfield's investment in Mendocino Software.

Before becoming an angel investor and venture capitalist, Mr. Thiele-Sardiña was a highly regarded operating executive. He was co-founder & CEO of Ingrian Networks, a leading data privacy provider, and co-founder and CEO of Tasmania Networks, a cache proxy company (acquired by Cisco). He was also a member of the founding management team for Brocade Communications Systems. As Brocade's Vice President of Sales and Business Development, he signed the company's original OEM agreements.

Prior to Brocade, he worked at Sun Microsystems for eleven years. While at Sun, Mr. Thiele-Sardiña started the company's telco business and grew it to 10% of Sun's worldwide revenue. He later led Sun's international sales and business development team (Asia, Japan, Latin America and EMEA), and subsequently was responsible for the company's corporate development organization in the Office of the Chairman.

Mr. Thiele-Sardiña holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from New York University, Stern School of Business.
 

John Kim: Managing Partner, HighBAR Partners

Before joining HighBAR Partners in 2009, John Kim was with W Capital Partners, a private equity fund with over $1 billion under management that acquires and makes direct investments in growth equity technology companies. Mr. Kim joined as the firm's first employee in 2003. During his time at W Capital, Mr. Kim acquired direct investments in the secondary market from corporations, financial institutions and general partnerships while also focusing on structured and special situations investing.

Prior to W Capital, Mr. Kim worked in operations as Director of Corporate Development at Zeborg (acquired by Emptoris), a venture-backed enterprise software company spun off from The Mitchell Madison Group, where he focused on financial operations and corporate strategy. He was also Director of Investments at ISL Management, a venture capital firm funded by JP Morgan dedicated to early stage financial services and software investing.

Mr. Kim also worked as an investment banker with JPMorgan Chase (and its predecessors) and Robertson Stephens, where he worked on complex leveraged finance and merger and acquisition transactions across sectors including technology, financial and healthcare services and industrials.

Mr. Kim holds a BS degree in Economics from The University of Chicago and an MBA with Honors from Columbia Business School.

Geoffrey Baehr: Advisor, U.S. Venture Partners & Almaz Capital

From 1988-2000, Geoffrey Baehr served as Chief Network Officer for Sun Microsystems responsible for technical and strategic network directions. During his tenure at Sun, he developed advanced technical products and, with his team, obtained more than one dozen patents.

Over the past several years, Mr. Baehr has worked as an advisor to Mohr Davidow Ventures and general partner with US Venture Partners (USVP) — two of the leading venture capital funds in Silicon Valley. At USVP, he made several investments in the networking, communications and software sectors.

Mr. Baehr is on the board of directors for six USVP portfolio companies and manages over $100 million in investments. He currently serves on a technology advisory board with Gordon Bell of Microsoft, Bernie Myerson, CTO of IBM, and Scott Bradner, Chief Security Officer of Harvard University.

Mr. Baehr earned a BA in Biochemistry and Natural Sciences from Fordham University.