Meet the team

John has more than 30 years of experience building high-growth technology companies, and a passion for empowering developers creating next-gen applications in the cloud. John previously held CEO roles at Engine Yard, Hyperion Solutions, Navis and Salesforce.com. Earlier in his career he was an engineer at Electronic Data Systems and held sales management roles at Oracle as the relational database management company grew from $100M to $1B.

Srini V Srinivasan is a Founder and Chief Product Officer at Aerospike. When it comes to databases, Srini Srinivasan is one of the recognized pioneers of Silicon Valley. He has two decades of experience designing, developing and operating high scale infrastructures. He also has over a dozen patents in database, web, mobile and distributed systems technologies. Srini co-founded Aerospike to solve the scaling problems he experienced with Oracle databases while he was Senior Director of Engineering at Yahoo. Srini has a B.Tech, Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jim LoDestro is a Silicon Valley veteran bringing a wealth of knowledge and experience to his role as Chief Revenue Officer at Aerospike. In previous roles he held worldwide sales responsibilities at Arbor Software/Hyperion, Responsys, and more recently Janrain, where he served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales. Jim received his B.A. in History from the University of Rochester, and an MBA in Finance from Babson College.

Bill Odell has spent over 25 years in the trenches launching new products, building businesses and leading high performance marketing organizations. He is passionate about helping educate customers on how to apply new technology solutions that help drive transformative business outcomes. Bill has held executive positions at Cisco, Dell Software and SonicWall as well as multiple category-creating growth stage B2B technology companies.

Lenley Hensarling is the Chief Strategy Officer of Aerospike. Lenley has more than 30 years of experience in engineering management, product management, and operational management at both startups and large successful software companies. Lenley previously held executive positions at Novell, Enterworks, JD Edwards, EnterpriseDB, and Oracle. He has extensive experience in delivering value to customers and shareholders in both enterprise applications and infrastructure software. Lenley believes that business is now happening in real-time and that the right infrastructure for serving data to new real-time applications is a rapidly accelerating requirement for businesses to succeed.

Alan Cyron is the Chief Financial Officer for Aerospike. Alan has over 25 years experience as CFO for various private and public companies including Engine Yard, Navis, Axis Systems, MobileAria and Paragon Trade Brands. Prior to becoming a CFO, he was a Managing Director in the corporate finance group at a predecessor of JPMorgan Chase advising public and private companies. He also serves as an Advisory Board Member of U.S. Bank and Board Member of Salutron.

Stephanie Grethen is the Chief Customer Officer at Aerospike. Stephanie has over 25 years of international experience. She has held executive positions in Customer Success, Product Management, New Product Introduction, and Strategic Customer Engagement for enterprise-grade on-premise and SaaS software products. Most recently, Stephanie has served as Chief Customer Officer at SAP. She is passionate about customer success through Digital Transformation and is an avid advocate for customer-centricity as an essential differentiator in today’s digital world. Stephanie holds a Bachelor's Degree in Public Administration.

John has more than 30 years of experience building high-growth technology companies, and a passion for empowering developers creating next-gen applications in the cloud. John previously held CEO roles at Engine Yard, Hyperion Solutions, Navis and Salesforce.com. Earlier in his career he was an engineer at Electronic Data Systems and held sales management roles at Oracle as the relational database management company grew from $100M to $1B.

Srini V Srinivasan is a Founder and Chief Product Officer at Aerospike. When it comes to databases, Srini Srinivasan is one of the recognized pioneers of Silicon Valley. He has two decades of experience designing, developing and operating high scale infrastructures. He also has over a dozen patents in database, web, mobile and distributed systems technologies. Srini co-founded Aerospike to solve the scaling problems he experienced with Oracle databases while he was Senior Director of Engineering at Yahoo. Srini has a B.Tech, Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Tim Connor has 35 years experience working with high growth, technology driven companies. I’ve been on all sides of the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a venture capital investor, investment banker and operating executive with private and public companies.

Gilman Louie is a partner of Alsop Louie Partners, a venture capital fund focused on helping entrepreneurs start companies. He is also the founder and first CEO of In-Q-Tel, a private nonprofit venture capital firm that invests in private companies on behalf of a wide range of United States intelligence agencies. Before founding In-Q-Tel, he ran a publicly traded company called Spectrum HoloByte which ultimately was acquired by Hasbro Corporation, where he served as chief creative officer of Hasbro Interactive and general manager of the Games.com. He serves as a member of the board of directors of the Markle Foundation and is chairman of the board of the Federation of American Scientists. Gilman is also an advisor to the US intelligence community.

Dain F. DeGroff is a co-founding partner of Triangle Peak Partners, LP and serves as President. He has significant experience working with private and public companies, providing strategic, process, and financing solutions. Prior to Triangle Peak, he served as a Managing Director with Fort Mason Capital, where he conducted private, direct investments in private and public companies, focusing on the Technology, Alternative Energy, and Energy sectors.

Prior to Fort Mason, Dain was an investment banker at both Hambrecht & Quist and JP Morgan, where he executed numerous M&A, debt and equity transactions in the technology sector and also led both firms’ global efforts in mobile and wireless technologies. Prior to his banking experience, he was a consultant for Accenture Consulting in its Technology practice. Before entering the workforce, Dain completed the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Engineering program and served as a U.S. Navy Submarine officer on a fast-attack submarine.

He serves as a board member for Bugcrowd and Stitch Labs and as a board observer for ACME Technologies, AlphaSense, Guardian Analytics, PCH International, Sojern, SnapLogic and TakeLessons.

He received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Dain serves as a Committee Member on the Stanford University DAPER (Athletics Department) Investment Fund.

Erich Ringewald is Senior Vice President and Chief Enterprise Architect at PayPal. He has spent over 30 years leading engineering and development teams at early stage startups as well as large, publicly traded companies. Before joining PayPal, Erich was Senior Vice President of Enterprise Architecture, Web and Mobile engineering at American Express. He led engineering and development teams at Amazon, Apple, Be, Boku, and Accept.