Company - Board of Directors

Board of Directors

Violin Memory's board includes the following experienced entrepreneurs, executives and investors.

Eric C. Cooper

Dr. Cooper is an investor and board member and was a co-founder and CEO of FORE Systems, Inc. He led FORE from its initial focus on ATM local-area networks to a leadership position in both enterprise and service-provider networking. He took the company public in 1994, and served as FORE's chairman until its acquisition by Marconi in 1999. When FORE was acquired for $4.5 billion, the company employed 2,000 people worldwide, generated $700 million in revenue, and earned $50 million in net income

Eric Cooper received a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in mathematics from Harvard University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. In 1999, Dr. Cooper was appointed Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He also serves as a Trustee of Carnegie Mellon University and a Director of several technology companies.

Mark Rosenblatt

Mark is the General Partner of Rationalwave Capital Partners, a technology-oriented investment fund he founded in 2003. Mark was a founder of Premium Wireless Services, Inc., formerly YourMobile, the first fully legal ringtone company in the United States in 1999. YourMobile pioneered ringtone rights, production, ordering, delivering, and payment systems in the US for mobile content. Mark served as Chief Financial Officer for YourMobile. Prior to 1999, Mark was a technology analyst at Lone Pine Capital and Omega Advisors. He also served as a consultant for McKinsey.

In 1981 Mark earned a B.S.E.E. and in 1985 and an MBA both from Yale University. He also serves on the board of Metara, a chemical metrology company focusing on the semiconductor industry (www.metarainc.com).

Tom Gill, Chairman & CEO

Tom joined Violin as CEO in January 2008 to lead the transition of Violin from a development phase company to an industry leader. He provides significant leadership, finance & operating experience in high growth environments to the executive team and the Board.

Tom was previously the CEO at FORE Systems, an industry leader in high speed networks with 6,000 customers in 75 countries. Tom was CFO during FORE's NASDAQ IPO in May 1994, before becoming COO in 1997 and CEO in 1998. During Tom's tenure, FORE's revenue grew from $5 million in 1990 to almost $1 billion in 2000. The company acquired 8 private and one public company as part of its expansion strategy. As CEO, Tom sold FORE Systems in June 1999 to Britain's General Electric Company. Since 2000, Tom has served on many private and public company boards.

Donpaul Stephens, President & Founder

Donpaul co- founded Violin in 2005 after identifying that the increasing demand in the market for high performance storage and scalable memory systems was not adequately addressed by any existing or foreseeable solution.

Donpaul has Masters and Bachelors of Engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and also received an Executive MBA from NYU. In his 14 year career, he has held engineering positions at Fore Systems, Ascend Communications and Bell Labs and was a General Manager at Vitesse. In 2000, he founded Xebeo which was acquired by UT Starcom.

Jon Bennett, Chief Technology Officer & Founder

Jon Bennett is a co-founder, CTO and the primary inventor of the Violin Switched Memory (VXM) technology.

Jon has a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Carnegie Mellon and a Masters degree from Harvard University. In his 15 year career, he has held senior architect positions at Fore Systems, BBN Technologies, Xylan and Motorola. Jon was Chief Engineer at RiverDelta Networks (1999-2001), a company that developed an industry-leading Cable head-end platform (CMTS) and was acquired by Motorola.

He has over 20 filed patents and more are in process as a result of the work at Violin.