Company

Pure Storage has a simple mission: to enable the widespread adoption of flash in the enterprise data center.

Management Team

Scott Dietzen

CEO

Scott Dietzen is a three-time successful entrepreneur with WebLogic, Zimbra, and Transarc. Most recently, he was President and CTO of Zimbra, a vendor of open source messaging and collaboration software. Zimbra (now part of VMware) was a pioneer of the Web 2.0 and Open Core paradigms. Zimbra was originally acquired by Yahoo!, where Dietzen served as interim SVP of Communications and Communities. Prior to Zimbra, Dietzen was CTO of BEA Systems, where he helped craft the technology and business strategy for WebLogic that drove BEA from $61m in annual revenues prior to the WebLogic acquisition to over $1B.

Dietzen came to BEA in 1998 via the acquisition of WebLogic, an innovator in Java and web application server technology. Prior to WebLogic, Dietzen was Principal Technologist of Transarc (acquired by IBM), a developer of distributed transaction and file sharing systems. He also currently serves on the board of big-data trailblazer Cloudera. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

John "Coz" Colgrove

Founder and CTO

John "Coz" Colgrove was one of the founding engineers at VERITAS Software (merged with Symantec in 2005), where his 20-year career culminated as Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for the company's Data Center Management Group. Coz was the primary architect for the hugely successful VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM) and VERITAS File System (VxFS), and later served in various other engineering, management, and consultative roles. During his time at VERITAS Coz became one of the industry's foremost experts on optimizing I/O streams and data structures for the unique idiosyncrasies of rotational hard drives, a challenge he's now re-solving for solid state Flash memory. Prior to VERITAS, Coz was with Amdahl Corporation, where he was a key contributor to the development of the UTS mainframe UNIX operating system kernel.

After leaving Symantec in 2008 to pursue personal interests, he joined Sutter Hill Ventures in the role of Entrepreneur in Residence. It was there he observed the growing acceptance of solid-state storage by enterprises that led him to co-found Pure Storage with John Hayes, with the goal of fully exploiting the advantages of the new technology. Coz is a graduate of Rutgers University, and holds over 70 patents in the areas of computer system and reliable data storage design.

David Hatfield

President

With 23 years of experience building high performance global sales, marketing and product delivery teams, Hatfield has held leadership roles at Akamai Technologies, VERITAS Software, Symantec, Limelight Networks and others. Prior to Pure Storage, Hatfield served as President of SaaS and EVP of Global Sales, Marketing and Services at Limelight Networks. He joined Limelight Networks when it was a small, privately held company and helped build the customer operations and strong global channel to deliver its distributed caching, cloud storage and application acceleration solutions to Global 2000 enterprises and governments. He led the company to over 800% growth during his tenure, propelling the company into its successful IPO.

Similarly, Hatfield joined Akamai Technologies before its IPO. While there, he was promoted to lead North American Sales and played a key role in scaling the organization from four customers and $400,000 to nearly 1,400 customers and $160 million in revenue in less than three years. Hatfield developed his storage industry expertise at VERITAS and later Symantec, following one of the largest enterprise software mergers in history. At VERITAS, he led the #1 sales organization into record year over year revenue growth. He was then promoted to Group Vice President of Sales at Symantec, following the acquisition, where he led an extended organization of nearly 1,000 employees, growing revenues from $600 million to $750 million.

John Hayes

Founder and Chief Architect

John Hayes joined John Colgrove to co-found Pure Storage in 2009 after serving in Yahoo!'s Office of the Chief Technologist, where he investigated web architectures for collaborative development of highly-reliable systems. He joined Yahoo! via the acquisition of Bix, where he was a founding engineer. His work prior to Yahoo! focused on developing distributed platforms for real-time interpersonal interaction in a variety of areas including entertainment, medicine, psychology, and defense.

During this time, he became interested in the underlying architecture of reliable distributed systems, particularly those built from unreliable components. His diverse experiences have led him to develop new approaches to make today's increasingly complex distributed systems more reliable. John holds a degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Guelph University in Ontario, Canada.

Matt Kixmoeller

VP Product Marketing / Management

Matt Kixmoeller is a storage veteran who saw first-hand the last major storage technology media upgrade: the move from tape to disk in the backup market. Matt was Vice President of enterprise product management for Symantec's Information Management products, including the NetBackup and Enterprise Vault. Kixmoeller oversaw product strategy and vision, engineering direction, and go-to-market activities for this $1B+ global product line. During his tenure Kixmoeller also held similar roles managing other Symantec products such as the Storage Foundation and CommandCentral Storage.

Kixmoeller joined Symantec in 2005 as part of the merger with VERITAS Software Corporation. Prior to joining VERITAS Software, Kixmoeller was co-founder of Centrata, a leading provider of IT service management software. He has also held positions with Adaptec and Gemini Consulting (now Cap Gemini, Ernst & Young). Kixmoeller holds a degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bob Wood

VP Engineering

Bob Wood joins Pure Storage from Harmonic/Omneon. Before joining Omneon in 2009, Wood served as Vice President of File System Engineering at NetApp, where he led a development team spanning five development centers worldwide and was responsible for NetApp's WAFL file system and their next generation clustered file system. Wood earlier served as a Vice President for all software engineering on the original executive team of Decru. Bob then led the integration of the Decru engineering organization into NetApp, after its acquisition. Wood also was a member of the founding team and Vice President of Engineering for a venture-funded software company.

Wood began his career managing development for the Fiery product line at Electronics For Imaging (EFI). Wood holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from University of Colorado, Boulder. He also holds three U.S. patents, has three patents pending, and has five published papers.

Christopher Zang

VP Support

Christopher Zang brings over a decade of leadership experience in support and service operations for private and public enterprise technologies to the Pure Storage leadership team. He joins the company from Imperva, where he served as VP of Product Support and Customer Advocacy, and was responsible for building the company’s global support organization. The company was later named one of 2011’s top performing IPOs by Investor’s Business Daily.

He has also held various executive roles at Iron Mountain (IRM), Mimosa Systems (acquired by Iron Mountain), AXS-One (AXO), and IXOS Software (now OpenText). At IXOS Software, Zang helped build the company’s multi-national support and services organization from the ground up. As VP of Support at Pure Storage, he will spearhead development of the company's global customer and partner support organization.

Michael Cornwell

Director, Technology & Strategy

Michael Cornwell joined from Sun Microsystems where he served as Lead Technologist for Flash Memory. He was responsible for development of NAND flash memory technology for Server and Enterprise applications including the first NAND designed for enterprise applications in partnership with Samsung Semiconductor. Led creation of world's fastest storage system, Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, utilizing all-flash design and core building block in TPC-C record-breaking transactional database machine developed by Sun/Oracle. Previously, Michael was the Manager of Storage Engineering for the iPod division of Apple, Inc. In this role, Michael was instrumental in the adoption of NAND flash in Apple products including iPod and iPhone.

Prior to joining Apple, Inc., Michael worked at Quantum Corporation as a Storage Architect focused on storage telemetry, virtual tape and disk-based backup technologies. Michael holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has 36 U.S. patents awarded in flash and other storage technologies.

Todd Engle

VP Operations

Todd Engle serves as VP, Operations for Pure Storage, and is responsible for the company's overall strategic business operations, overseeing product forecasting, manufacturing and supply chain vendor relations. Todd joins Pure Storage after 12 years at Xiotech, where he served as VP of manufacturing. Under Engle's direction, Xiotech successfully expanded its global manufacturing operations, implemented an improved supply chain management system and streamlined its order fulfillment processes, achieving 99-percent on-time delivery and 95-percent production forecast accuracy rates.

Prior to Xiotech, Engle served as director of business operations at Computer Network Technologies, where he successfully automated the company's sales, revenue and production forecasting systems. He holds a BA in accounting from Metropolitan State University.

Ko Yamamoto

Director, System Design

Ko Yamamoto joined Pure Storage from Quantum Corporation, where he was Director of Hardware Engineering for the company's DXi Disk Backup System product line. Prior to Quantum, he spent 8 years at NetApp, where in addition to directing the Platform Engineering team responsible for delivering high-quality base hardware and software for NetApp's mainstream NAS product lines, he gained experience in acquisitions, partnership, and management of internationally distributed development projects. A two-year engagement at Corsair Communications, where he directed wireless telephony hardware development, was preceded by 12 years with Tandem Computers, Inc., where he was a key contributor to four generations of the company's NonStop™ fault-tolerant computer systems, and gained a keen appreciation for the principles of reliable system design and economics.

As Director of Systems Engineering at Pure Storage Inc., his mission is to deliver the high-quality, reliable, cost-effective hardware platforms on which the company's technology is based. Mr. Yamamoto is an honors graduate of the Electrical and Computer Engineering program at the University of California at Davis (UCD), and is the holder of three issued patents, with additional patents applied for.

Matt Burr

VP of Sales

As VP of Sales, Matt Burr is aggressively driving the company's domestic sales strategy and expansion. With more than 15 years of Sales and Sales Management experience, Mr. Burr excels at building teams and strategies that grow revenue at both early stage companies and large complex organizations. He has held leadership roles within Symantec (via the VERITAS Software acquisition) and most recently Matt led the growth of the Western Region for Limelight Networks yielding 100% growth in revenue during his time.

While at Symantec/VERITAS, he held various roles in Direct Sales, OEM Sales and Field Sales Management with a core focus on emerging products. Mr. Burr's current responsibilities include ensuring the success of Pure Storage's earliest customers through the alpha and beta program as well as building out the Sales Organization.