Shekar Ayyar is a seasoned technology executive and industry leader with over twenty-five years of experience spanning general management, research, strategy, mergers & acquisitions and business development. Before joining Arrcus, Shekar was Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Telco and Edge Cloud business at VMware. He incubated and grew this business to become one of the largest vertical opportunities for VMware in the context of 5G and Edge Computing.

Prior to his General manager role, Shekar was EVP of Strategy and Corporate Development, leading VMware’s M&A and strategic investments for several years. From opportunity and target identification, to deal structuring, negotiation, and closure, he oversaw over 60 acquisitions and investments across a wide range of target companies and transaction sizes. These included the acquisitions of Nicira for software defined networking, Airwatch for mobility management, Velocloud for software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), Heptio for cloud-native Kubernetes orchestration, and Uhana for AI driven closed loop automation of mobile networks.

Before joining VMware in 2007, Shekar led product management and business development at companies like BindView, a compliance and security software company acquired by Symantec and Instantis, Inc. a web application automation company acquired by Oracle. In prior roles at other companies, including Lucent and McKinsey, Shekar advised C-level executives on a wide range of strategic technology and business decisions.

Shekar has an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated as a Palmer Scholar. He also holds a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, both in electrical engineering.

Shekar is on the board of Altair as well as the regional board of Room to Read, a non-profit focused on supporting literacy and girls’ education globally.

Keyur Patel brings 27+ 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 nearly 70 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).

Krish Prabhu is an independent technology consultant based in Dallas, TX.

He retired from AT&T in 2016, after serving five years as chief technology officer and president of AT&T Labs. His organization was responsible for the introduction of new technology and services in AT&T’s network, and he had responsibility for AT&T’s supply chain organization as well as AT&T’s intellectual property organization.

Mr. Prabhu has a varied operating experience, having served stints in the US and Europe. From 2004 to 2008, he served as president and chief executive officer of Tellabs, Inc, a Chicago based company that supplied networking technology to telecom operators. Prior to joining Tellabs, from 2001 until 2004, Mr. Prabhu was a venture partner at Morgenthaler Ventures where he was involved with the funding and development of startup companies specializing in networking hardware and software. Previously, between 1991 and 2001, Mr. Prabhu was with Alcatel where he held different executive positions. He served as chief operating officer of Alcatel from 1999-2001, as chief executive officer of Alcatel USA from 1997-1999.

He began his career in 1980 at Bell Laboratories as a member of technical staff. Mr. Prabhu holds a Master of Science degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India and MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh. He has received distinguished alumnus awards from IIT Bombay and University of Pittsburgh.

Roy H. Chestnutt is currently on the Board of Directors at Telstra, Digital Turbine and Intelsat. He is on the Accenture Luminaries Board of Advisors, a Senior Advisor at VMware, Tillman Global Holdings and FTI/Delta Partners. For the last three years, he has been on the Board of Directors of Saudi Telecom and a Senior Advisor at Blackstone. He is the former Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for Verizon. He was responsible for the development and implementation of Verizon’s overall corporate strategy, including business development, joint ventures, strategic investments, and acquisitions and divestitures. He served on the Board of Directors of the GSMA and was Chairman of the Chief Strategy Officers Group of the GSMA comprised of 25 global strategists from the world’s leading carriers. He also served as a member of the Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC Board of Trustees.

Before being named to his position in 2013, Chestnutt was Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy with responsibility for the formulation and execution of Verizon’s strategic plan addressing new markets, solutions and services that capitalize on the company’s assets, capabilities and brand across all lines of business.

Chestnutt joined Verizon in 2011 from Motorola Networks where he served as Corporate Vice President of the Americas and helped lead the successful transition of the business unit to new ownership by Nokia Siemens Networks.

Chestnutt was previously Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Grande Communications, a facilities -based “triple-play”communications provider in Texas. His responsibilities included leading the transition of Grande from a startup to a full service, market-driven company resulting in the successful sale of the company.

Prior to joining Grande, Chestnutt was Senior Vice President of National Field Sales and General Business for Sprint-Nextel. From 1998 to 2005, Chestnutt held executive positions at Nextel Communications as Regional Vice President of the Western US based in the San Francisco Bay Area the Southwest Region based in Austin. He also has General Management experience with PrimeCo Personal Communications and AirTouch Cellular. Chestnutt earned an MBA from the University of San Francisco, with an emphasis in General Management and International Business and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from San Jose State University.

Bask is the CEO of Baskmind, providing advisory councils for companies and developing next generation enterprise business applications for startups.

He serves as an Advisor to several high growth companies, including Zoom, Cohesity, Automation Anywhere, ThoughtSpot,Netspyglass, SimpliFai, TextIQ etc. He is on the board of FSS, SmartHub.ai, Grainite, and the chairman of the board for Inerci Capital. He also chairs or participates in Technology, Audit or Compensation committees.

A respected industry veteran, Bask brings more than 30 years of experience in executing and driving change in traditional Fortune 100 manufacturing companies and Silicon Valley-based high technology firms.

Recently, he served as the Chief Information and Digital transformation Officer for VMWare, managing critical technology systems and driving Digital transformation. He also led M&A integration and SaaS transformation.

From 2016 to 2018, he was both the CIO for VMWare and the EVP and CIO of Dell Technologies, His team successfully executed the largest technology integration between Dell/EMC, and the revamp of Dell ecommerce. He established the Dell Digital way to drive Digital transformation through people, process, and technology.

A customer and growth focused leader, he led growth programs like establishment of Industry verticals, incubation of EDGE business unit and chaired CXO councils and customer advisory boards.

Prior to this, he served as CIO at Juniper Networks, Group CIO and officer at Honeywell, and executive roles in Glaxo SmithKline and Johnson & Johnson.

Johan Wibergh is a seasoned technology executive with over 35 years of experience in managing large-scale operations across the globe, having served in various C-suite positions with leading global companies for more than 15 years. He brings with him a wealth of experience in technology innovation and leadership in networking and telecommunications.

Johan's career includes nearly 8 years as the Group Chief Technology Officer of Vodafone and 6.5 years as EVP & Head of Business Unit Networks for Ericsson. He has also managed P&Ls of up to EUR 13bn.

Johan’s leadership experience spans various areas such as enterprise networks, digital and IT systems, cyber security, product management, operational excellence, and large-scale 24/7 operations. In addition to being a member of the Executive Advisory Board of Arrcus, Johan is a member of US company boards, including Trimble, a Nasdaq-listed company, Marconi and Avanci, and Cohere Technologies.

Johan's experience spans working in a highly regulated industry, building up a business from scratch, and driving continuous cost efficiency. He also has a vast contact network with leading companies in the technology sector and experience in business in all regions of the world.

Sumeet is Senior Vice President and Head of Engineering at ThoughtSpot. In this role, Sumeet leads ThoughtSpot’s global engineering team in continuously improving and scaling the AI-powered data analytics platform. Prior to joining ThoughtSpot, Sumeet served as SVP and GM of Service Provider Networking at Cisco. In this role, he led the engineering & product management team for the Service Provider routing portfolio and played a key role in turning around and driving profitable market share growth of this multi-billion dollar business.

Prior to joining ThoughtSpot, Sumeet served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Service Provider Networking Cisco. In this role, he lead the engineering, development, and product management team for the Service Provider routing portfolio and was responsible for profitable market share growth of this multi-billion dollar portfolio .

During his 22+ years at Cisco, Sumeet built and lead teams that implemented a number of industry-leading transitions across a breadth of Cisco products and technologies. His team’s work included delivery of flagship networking platforms such CIsco 12K, CRS, NCS, and Cisco 8000. His team delivered Cisco’s Network Operating System SW evolution across service provider and data center space. Sumeet’s team drove business model innovation in networking driving higher quality, innovation velocity as well as business transformation valuing software separately from hardware while creating a recurring revenue model. Sumeet is passionate about customer success and commits to helping customers achieve their business outcomes. At Cisco, Sumeet was recognized as executive sponsor of the year for his work with customers.

Sumeet has a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIT(BHU), Varanasi, India. He earned a Certificate in Advanced Software Systems from Stanford University. On the business side, Sumeet holds an MBA degree from University of Phoenix and is pursuing GMP at Wharton which he expects to complete in 2020.

When Sumeet isn’t working, he spends time with his children Saanvi and Krish along with his spouse Meenakshi. And when he finds more time, he enjoys reading up on economics, climate change, and sustainable scalable development.

Andrew is a highly passionate telco, media and tech professional with over 26 years of global experience, operating as an executive, advisor and investor. During his career, Andrew has lived and worked in New York, London, Dubai and Singapore, advising Boards, management teams and investors of large-cap companies and early-stage ventures. Andrew has a deep passion for innovation, is an incurable optimist and a strong believer in non-linear, tech driven growth.

Amarjit Gill is a serial entrepreneur and he Co-founded Maginatics, acquired by EMC. Prior to Maginatics, Amarjit co-founded and helped lead three companies that built lasting technologies. He was co-founder and VP of Business Development and Sales at SiByte (acquired by Broadcom), co-founder and EVP of Business Development and Sales at PA Semi (acquired by Apple), and co-founder and CEO of Agnilux (acquired by Google). Earlier in his career, Amarjit was Director of Sales for Strategic Accounts in Digital Equipment Corporation’s semiconductor group. After that business unit was purchased by Intel, he served in a similar capacity for Intel. Amarjit also worked for many years at Texas Instruments in its technical sales organization. Amarjit received a BS in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University.

Dave is currently the CEO of PacketFabric. He has previously served as head of Cisco’s Chief Technology and Architecture Office, and led Cisco’s core innovation programs, unifying and advancing strategic co-innovation partnerships and programs. He is also one of two individuals to be both Cisco and Juniper Fellows working on the operating system and next-generation routing systems. Dave holds hundreds of patents. He has also served on the Boards of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, Advanced Imaging Society, Linux Foundation, Linux Foundation Networking, ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector, Governmental Advisory boards and Open Networking Foundation.

Ankur Prakash is a Partner at Liberty Global Ventures since 2012 and has invested $150M+ across 20 companies ranging from pre-revenue ones to those with an established product-market fit looking for growth. His core focus areas include enterprise software, cloud, mobility, core infrastructure and AI. Some of Ankur’s notable investments include Arrcus, Aviatrix, Awake Security (ACQD: Arista Networks), Guavus (ACQD: Thales), Lacework, Mindmeld (ACQD: Cisco), Mojo Vision, Plume, Pensando and Versa Networks.

As a Silicon Valley veteran, Ankur has held leadership roles in engineering, product management and strategy functions at various companies including Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper Networks. Prior to Liberty Global, Ankur was at Juniper where he was responsible for Juniper’s core routing infrastructure platform. As part of Juniper’s venture investment team, he also worked on the investments in Violin Memory (VMEM), Vidyo and FireEye (FEYE). In 2003, Ankur was a founding engineer at NetDevices, where he led the development of industry’s first converged gateway product for mid to large enterprises. NetDevices was acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in 2006, and Ankur led the engineering and development of the Alcatel’s access products portfolio.

Ankur holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the IIT Kanpur, India.

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.

Chris Kauffman is a Principal at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm that partners with founders from seed through growth stages and beyond to build companies that withstand the test of time. At GC, Chris focuses on investments in enterprise software companies and artificial intelligence.  Prior to joining GC, Chris was the Vice President of Finance at Ruggable LLC, where he focused on e-commerce. Previously, he was a Vice President in the Frontier Technologies sector at SoftBank Investment Advisers (SoftBank Vision Fund) and held prior roles at Golden Gate Capital and Bain & Company. Chris received his BSc Business in finance and psychology from Indiana University, Kelley School of Business

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.

In a career spanning 20+ years, Derek Yeung has played a significant role in developing networking technology. He has built world-class routing platforms and has implemented all major routing protocols which have been deployed in Fortune 500 enterprises and major service providers.

Derek is a former Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems and has also held senior development positions at Procket Networks (acquired by Cisco). In the early Cisco days, Derek was the lead OSPF developer and authored the OSPF traffic engineering solution. At Procket Networks, Derek designed and implemented all aspects of routing functionalities, including AM, RIB, VRF manager, and IS-IS from scratch. After Cisco acquired Procket Networks, Derek was one of the lead engineers who architected and implemented the Nexus operating system (NX-OS). His most recent work at Cisco involved network virtualization, programmatic APIs, BGP, and YANG models.

Passionate about code quality and efficiency, Derek is continually looking for optimum solutions for switching and routing applications.

An active participant at IETF, he has several RFCs, drafts, and has multiple patents issued in switching and routing.

Derek holds a BS in Computer Science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

Yih-In Wang has 20+ years of operational expertise in the semiconductor industry in the capacity of planning, sourcing, delivery, and returns.

Prior to joining Arrcus, she was director of supply chain at Elenion Technologies (acquired by Nokia in 2020). She was responsible for managing supplier relationships to meet capacity requirements and support company’s growth revenue, proactively addressing problems, and solving them with cross-functional team effort. At SiTime Corporation and Legend Silicon, she held leadership positions for ensuring development and implementation of efficient operations and cost-effective systems to meet current and future needs of the organizations.

Yih-In has a BS in Business Administration from San Francisco State University. Outside of work, she loves to explore the world and practices yoga regularly.

A recognized leader in the networking industry, Abhay is a seasoned engineering executive with a passion to build best-in-class products and strong sustainable teams. In a career that has spanned 25+ years, he was most recently part of the Cisco leadership team that built the Nexus 7k, the first router for the datacenter as well as the Nexus 9k, 6k, and 5k family of products. He led development efforts in multiple technologies including BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, BFD, Segment Routing, IPv6, OTV, LISP, and FabricPath. Most recently, he was leading the NETCONF/YANG manageability, virtual platforms, and DevOps teams focused on enabling network programmability and automation. While being deeply rooted in technology, Abhay’s focus is to develop industry-leading solutions based on optimal network protocols and enable network automation through advanced telemetry and cloud analytics.

Prior to Cisco, Abhay held senior engineering positions at Sun Microsystems and Wipro Infotech (India) where he was responsible for the design and development of Network Protocols, Solaris TCP/IP stack, and Remote Access Servers.

An active participant in industry forums including IETF, Abhay served as the co-chair for Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) working group from 2007-2018 and has also authored 12 RFCs. A prolific technologist, Abhay has been awarded 37 patents in areas of Routing, Layer3, and Layer2 Protocols, as well as Wireless and Mobile Ad-Hoc routing (MANET).

Abhay holds an M. Tech degree in Electronics and Telecommunications (E&TC) from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. In his spare time, Abhay likes to keep up with the new developments in social engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and shiny gadgets.

Sanjay Kumar has over 20 years of experience in the networking industry, at companies like Cisco Systems, Broadcom, Aruba Networks (HPE) and IP Infusion. He has held leadership roles in Product Management, Product/Corporate Marketing, and has a proven track record of leading product development, creating and driving go-to-market strategies and developing compelling messaging for multi-billion dollar product lines, across Enterprise and Service Provider segments. Prior to joining Arrcus, he was CMO at IP Infusion where he successfully created a new brand identity and led the overall global marketing and Strategic Alliances strategy.

Jen Olson has more than 20 years of experience at various SaaS, technology, and telecommunication companies, serving as a leader across finance, HR, and operations, and helping companies scale and grow. She has built rigor and process and also prepared companies as they have gone through m&a exits. Prior to joining Arrcus, she was the SVP of Finance at Abstract where she led the finance, legal and compliance, and operations teams. Prior to Abstract, she was the SVP Finance at AdsWizz (acquired by Pandora/SXM), leading the finance and HR teams in the US and Bucharest, Romania. She held multiple roles at FreeWheel (acquired by Comcast), ending her experience there as the VP of Finance for the Publisher Platform Division. Jen has a BA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz and an MBA from San Francisco State University. An outdoor enthusiast, she enjoys hiking, camping, sailing, and snorkeling.

Vas is a seasoned leader with over 25 years of experience primarily leading global pre-sales and post-sales technical teams in larger technology companies such as Cisco, Oracle and Proofpoint as well as startups like Shape Security and ThreatMetrix. Vas has worked closely with a variety of customers including large enterprises as well as service providers across different parts of the world.

Vas joins Arrcus from Proofpoint where he led the Professional Services organization which was responsible for onboarding customers onto the Proofpoint security and compliance platforms. At Proofpoint, Vas drove a number of key initiatives including the launch of new Managed Services offerings.

Prior to Proofpoint, Vas led the Solutions Consulting team at ThreatMetrix (which was acquired by Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions) and US Business Development at Callsign (a London-based startup) where he drove the entry of Callsign into the US authentication market. Vas was also at Shape Security where he led the Sales Engineering and Support/Services teams and was instrumental in driving significant revenue growth. Vas was at Oracle where he led the Sales Engineering team for the OEM business and also founded and led Mtuity which delivered mobile applications for enterprises.

Previously, Vas was at Cisco where he had a number of roles leading sales engineering and services teams. His tenure at Cisco included two international assignments – one in Singapore where he led the sales engineering team in APAC and the other in India where he led the services team for the service provider segment there.

Vas holds an MBA from UC Irvine as well as a BSEE from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He enjoys mountain biking, ski mountaineering, and flying airplanes for recreation.