Management
| Ben Golub | President and Chief Executive Officer |
| Rikk Carey | Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations |
| Peter Lester | Vice President of Strategic Partnerships |
| J. Todd Masonis | Founder and Vice President of Products |
| John McCrea | Vice President of Marketing |
| Cameron T. Ring | Founder and Chief Architect |
| Venkates Swaminathan | Vice President of Business Development |
| Ryan King | Senior Director of Engineering |
Board of Directors
| Michael Moritz | Partner, Sequoia Capital |
| Venky Ganesan | Managing Director, Globespan Capital Partners |
| Ben Golub | President and Chief Executive Officer, Plaxo |
| Tim Koogle | Former President and Chief Executive Officer, Yahoo! Inc. |
| Todd Masonis | Founder and Vice President of Products, Plaxo |
| Ram Shriram | Founder, Sherpalo |
Board of Advisors
| C.K. Cheng | General Partner, Harbinger Ventures, US Operations |
| Ron Conway | General Partner, Angel Investors LP |
| Taher Elgamal | Co-Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Securify, Inc. |
Ben Golub is the President and Chief Executive Officer for Plaxo. Prior to joining Plaxo, he was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for VeriSign, Inc. In his eight years at VeriSign, he also served as Senior Vice President of the security and payments business and General Manager of VeriSign’s managed security services business. In these roles, Ben managed worldwide sales, marketing, product development, support, operations, and business development activities. Prior to VeriSign, Ben held a number of product development, operations, and business development roles at companies such as Avid Technology, Inc., and Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Ben holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Masters in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He graduated with a B.A. in Public Policy from Princeton University, and holds a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) accreditation.
Rikk Carey is the Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations for Plaxo. Rikk joined Plaxo in March 2002 as its first employee and was instrumental in bringing the company from its inception, to its current success as the market leader. He brings over 20 years experience in engineering, product development, and management to his role. Rikk’s previous senior management positions include General Manager at Yahoo!, Senior Vice President of Product Development at eGroups, an early founder of Listen.com, and Senior Director of Engineering at SGI. Prior to SGI, Rikk served at Vertigo/Cubicomp as Architect and Director of Engineering.
Rikk holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Maryland and a Masters of Science from Cornell University. Rikk has several patents and has received a number of technology awards.
Peter Lester is Vice President Strategic Partnerships for Plaxo. He is responsible for forging strategic partnerships and alliances to drive Plaxo’s growth. Previously, Peter was Senior Director of World Wide OEM Sales at Netscape. He has held a variety of management positions at leading technology companies including Digital, E.piphany, Pacific Bell, SGI, and Totality.
Peter holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Todd Masonis is a co-founder and Vice President of Products for Plaxo. He is Plaxo’s lead user interface designer and Windows programmer. Plaxo is the third company Todd has founded. Previously, he co-founded netElement and Natient Technologies. Todd also served as a systems developer with e-steam, Inc.
Todd received a Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems with a concentration in Computational Linguistics from Stanford University.
John McCrea is the vice president of marketing for Plaxo. His responsibilities include marketing, product design and management and public relations.
John is a seasoned marketing executive and a web pioneer, who has had a significant impact on the evolution of the web as a new medium and as a platform for communication. While at Silicon Graphics (SGI), he struck the very first website sponsorship deal, and coined the term “Powered by…” as the de facto standard for such promotions. He was the driving force behind SGI’s WebFORCE, the first turnkey web server, launched in January ’95, with the tagline “To Author and To Serve.” Immediately prior to joining Plaxo, John held the position of senior vice president of marketing at Radiance Technologies, developer of a breakthrough “digital FedEx” software solution. Before Radiance, John co-founded Affinia, a pioneer in contextual web advertising, which developed a predecessor to Google's AdSense.
John earned an M.B.A. from Stanford University and an S.B. Humanities from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cameron Ring is a co-founder and Chief Architect for Plaxo. Cameron is responsible for client-side development at Plaxo, including Outlook integration and client-server protocol. Previously, he held the position of Chief Server Engineer for netElement, a company he also co-founded.
Cameron holds a Bachelor of Science and a Masters of Science from Stanford University where he was a President’s Scholar.
Venkates “Swami” Swaminathan is Vice President of Business Development for Plaxo. His responsibilities include establishing and managing distribution, product, and revenue alliances for Plaxo.
Previous engagements include serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Strategist of NightFire Software (acquired by NeuStar in 2003), which he also founded and held a seat on the board of directors. Before founding NightFire in 1997, Swami held marketing and program management positions at Telesphere Solutions, Inc. and TCSI Corporation
Swami earned a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, New Delhi, India, and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Ryan King is the Senior Director of Engineering for Plaxo. His responsibilities include server and web software development, and the operation of the Plaxo service. Ryan Joined Plaxo in January 2003 as one of the first engineers and was instrumental in architecting, designing, and building the Plaxo servers and service, and was critical in helping the service grow and scale.
Ryan holds a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from UCLA.
Michael Moritz, Board of Directors
Mike is a partner with Sequoia Capital with a focus on information technology investments. He has been an early stage investor in several of the Internet&rsqup;s most successful companies, including Google, PayPal, and Yahoo!. He currently serves on the boards of several notable Internet companies, including Google and Zappos. Previously, Mike was a founding Director of Agile Software, Global Center (acquired by Frontier Corp), LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft), eGroups (acquired by Yahoo!), NeoMagic, Quote.Com (acquired by Lycos), Visigenic (acquired by Borland), CenterRun (acquired by Sun), PayPal (acquired by eBay) and Yahoo!.
Before joining Sequoia Capital in 1986, Mike worked in a variety of positions at Time Warner and was a founder of Technologic Partners.
Venky Ganesan, Board of Directors
Venky is a Managing Director based in Globespan’s Palo Alto office where he focuses on enterprise software and infrastructure investments. His active portfolio consists of investments in Exeros, Fogbreak, Nominum, Plaxo, Sendia, and Steelwedge.
Prior to Globespan, Venky was a Vice President of JAFCO Ventures where he focused on enterprise software investments. Prior to founding Trigo Technologies, Venky was an Associate in JAFCO’s Boston office where he envisioned the idea behind Trigo and where the company was incubated at the time of inception. As co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Trigo Technologies, Inc. Venky played an integral role in helping the company take the leadership position in the product information management space. Trigo was acquired by IBM resulting in a substantial investment return for all investors.
Previously, Venky worked with McKinsey & Co. in their Los Angeles and Johannesberg offices. He also was a program manager at Microsoft’s Encarta group. Venky received degrees in Computer Science, Math, and Economics from both the California Institute of Technology and Reed College.
Tim Koogle, Board of Directors
Tim (TK), was President and CEO of Yahoo! Inc., from 1995-2001, building it into a leading Internet media company with annual net revenues of more than one billion dollars.
Prior to Yahoo!, TK was President of Intermec Corporation, where annual sales increased nearly 50 percent during his three-year leadership. TK also served as Corporate Vice President of Intermec’s parent company, Western Atlas Inc., a multi- national information services and technology company with revenues exceeding $2.4 billion annually. Previously, TK spent nine years with Motorola where he held a number of executive management positions.
Ram Shriram, Board of Directors
Ram Shriram was Vice President of Business Development at Amazon.com, reporting to Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO. During Shriram’s tenure at Amazon.com he grew the customer count from 3 million to 11 million users. Prior to Amazon.com, Shriram was CEO of Junglee Corp., a company that Amazon acquired in 1998. Before joining Junglee, Shriram was an early member of the Netscape Communications executive team. He initiated and built relationships with a targeted set of partners worldwide, helping Netscape to build market share and revenue momentum.
In 1996, Shriram crafted Netscape’s indirect channels of distribution worldwide, and managed several hundred people with 16 direct reports across three continents (North America, Europe, and Asia ), producing well over half of Netscape’s $346 million annual revenue. A year later, Shriram oversaw the OEM and website sales functions at Netscape, and helped generate more than $100 million in revenue from Netscape’s high-traffic website alone. Shriram also serves on the boards of Google, Yodlee, Elance, and 247Customer.com, and is a leading angel investor in Silicon Valley.
C.K. Cheng, Board of Advisors
C.K. is a General Partner of Harbinger venture, US Operations. Since 1983, C.K. has served the MiTAC-SYNNEX Group in different capacities. Prior to co-founding Harbigner, C.K. was the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and Manufacturing Operation at SYNNEX.
He received his MBA from Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan, and a B.S. degree in Physics from Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan.
Ron Conway, Board of Advisors
Ron Conway is the founding General Partner of Angel Investors, LP, and advisor to a number of high-profile Internet startups.
Prior to founding Angel Investors, Ron held leadership positions at companies such as CBT Systems (now SmartForce), Personal Training Systems, Altos Computer Systems and National Semiconductor Corporation. Ron also serves on the boards of Red Herring Magazine, Gradient Technology, Blue Pumpkin Software, AtWeb (sold to Netscape) and OneMediaPlace (formerly AdAuction).
Taher Elgamal, Board of Advisors
Dr. Taher Elgamal is a leading pioneer of public key cryptography and digital signature technology. His Elgamal cryptography has been adopted as the digital signature standard (DSS). He is presently Co-Chairman and CTO of Securify, Inc.
Dr. Elgamal was previously Chief Scientist at Netscape Communications where he pioneered SSL, the standard for web security. Prior to that, he was Director of Engineering at RSA Data Security, Inc., where he developed the RSA cryptographic toolkits, the industry standard for security-enabled systems development. He received both his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
