Board of Directors

Guru Chahal is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners focusing on early stage enterprise startups in cloud, security, DevOps, observability, and enterprise IT. He first joined the Lightspeed team in 2012 and then joined the founding team at Avi Networks (one of his investments) to help build out the early stages of the business. Avi Networks was acquired by VMware in 2019. Back at Lightspeed after his time at Avi Networks, Guru leverages his founding experience, product expertise and extensive customer network in helping entrepreneurs through funding and beyond. During his operational career, he has been part of three product lines as they’ve gone from inception to over a billion dollar run rate. His previous roles include product leadership roles at Avi Networks (next generation application services), Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco), and Tropos Networks (acquired by ABB). Guru started his career as a software engineer at Cisco Systems, working on distributed systems within networking and holds several patents in the space.

Devesh Garg is a seasoned technology executive with global entrepreneurial, strategic, and operational experience in early stage start-ups as well as private and public market leaders.

A calculated risk taker, Devesh has been at the forefront of several technology and business market inflections including the EDA industry, digitization of broadband communications, multi-core processing, and the emerging markets of Asia. He is a passionate builder of teams, businesses, and world-class companies.

Most recently he served as President of EZchip (NASDAQ:EZCH) which was acquired by Mellanox (NASDAQ:MLNX). Prior to that, he was the founding CEO of Tilera Corporation—the pioneer in high core count multi-processors (acquired by EZchip).

In 2007, Devesh moved to Mumbai, India where he served as the Managing Director for Bessemer Venture Partners and its $385M private equity fund. While at Bessemer, Devesh was the investor/partner who sourced the investment in PA Semi (acquired by Apple) for their in-house microprocessor development.

Devesh was an early pre-IPO employee (~#50) of Broadcom (NASDAQ:BRCM) where he built a team and ~$500M annual business within 3 years. In his last role at Broadcom, he served as the General Manager of the Security Line of Business. During his 7-year tenure, Broadcom reached a peak market capitalization of $72B and completed 22 acquisitions. He also was an early pre-IPO employee at Synopsys and early at LSI Logic.

He is an active investor, Board Member, and Advisor to a broad range of companies including the datacenter and cloud, security, analytics, IoT, and consumer segments. Some notable exits include Sibyte (acquired by Broadcom), PA Semi (acquired by Apple), Maginatics (acquired by EMC), EyeGroove (acquired by Facebook), and K2 Optronics (acquired by Emcore).

Devesh has an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University.

A sports enthusiast and avid adventure traveler, Devesh has trekked to base camp at Mt. Everest and with his family has explored over 40 countries and countless cities.

As managing director at General Catalyst Partners, Steve invests in early-stage enterprise start-ups, particularly in the enterprise space. Until 2013, Steve was CTO and SVP of Research and Development at VMware. During his tenure, Steve helped build a world-class 3,000-person engineering organization that delivered numerous industry-changing products; he was also named InfoWorld’s CTO of the Year in 2009. Prior to VMware, Steve co-led the development of a virtual CPU with “code morphing” technology at Transmeta Corporation, and held roles at SGI and MIPS Technologies. Outside of work, Steve focuses on the advancement of children’s education, particularly around STEM. Steve holds a PhD and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University, and a BA with distinction in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Keyur Patel brings 20+ years of experience leading and executing complex networking projects at start-ups and market-leading public companies.

Keyur was a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco where he has played an instrumental role in architecting and developing Routing and VPN solutions including critical modifications to BGP, BGP NSR, L3VPNs, L2VPNs, EVPNS, MVPNs, Segment Routing, RPKI RTR Protocol, Interdomain Security, Routing Policies, and Routing Analytics.

Prior to Cisco, Keyur held senior engineering positions at AYR Networks (acquired by Cisco) and Tasman Networks (acquired by Nortel) where he was responsible for the design and development of Unicast and Multicast Routing Protocols, Routing Infrastructure, and Layer2 protocols.

Keyur holds 54+ patents in areas of Interdomain Routing and Security, Fast Re-Route Technologies, Network Service Chaining, Layer2 protocols, IPv6, TCP, VPNs, and Routing Virtualization technologies like Optimal Route Reflection.

Keyur is very active in industry forums including IETF and has authored 50 RFCs and Internet Drafts. He also serves as a co-chair for Secured Interdomain Routing Operations (SIDROPS) working group at IETF.

Keyur holds an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) and started his career working as a Research Assistant at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI).

Chris Rust is a founder and General Partner of Clear Ventures​, where he invests in​technology companies. Prior to founding Clear in 2016, ​he spent ​13 years as a Partner at Sequoia Capital and USVP.  His seed and early stage investments include Abrizio (PMCS), Avanex (IPO AVNX), Dune (BRCM), GoPro (IPO GPRO), LVL7 (BRCM), Mellanox (IPO MLNX), and VxTel (INTC). He also spent 12 years in operating roles as a development engineer, network architect, and product manager. Chris was a co-founder and Lead Architect of broadband access pioneer Roadrunner (re-branded as ​Time Warner Cable Internet) ​. Roadrunner grew to 14 million subscribers, over $4 Billion in annual ​revenue, and was ​the key driver of Charter Communication’s $56 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Chris earned a B.S.E.E. and ​an M.S.E.E from the University of Lowell, an M.S. Telecommunications Engineering and an M.E. Engineering Management from the University of Colorado, Boulder.