Experienced entrepreneurs, executives and investors

Donald Basile, Chief Executive Officer
Don brings to Violin more than 20 years experience driving innovation at leading public and private companies in a variety of industries including storage, data networking, cable, telecommunications, computing and semiconductor. Among his past accomplishments, Don has managed the growth and sales of companies valued at more than $2 billion.
He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Bert Nordberg
Bert Nordberg is currently the President of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications. Previously he served as the Executive Vice President Ericsson Corporation. From 2004 to 2007, Mr. Nordberg was Executive Vice President, Group Function Sales and Marketing of Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson.

Mr. Nordberg joined Ericsson in 1996 as Head of Enterprise Services, which provides all services for Enterprise Segments within Ericsson. Prior to his appointment to EVP in 2004, Mr. Nordberg’s responsibilities included EVP of Ericsson Services including all Services for the Operator Segment, EVP Division Global Services, Head of Business Unit Global Services, Head of Business Unit Systems and SVP, Group Function Sales and Marketing.

Larry Lang
Larry Lang served as vice president and general manager of the mobile service provider business unit at Cisco for over 8 years. Leading a team of several hundred engineers and business professionals, he grew the mobile internet business from near-zero to over $290 million annual bookings. Their products are installed in nearly 100 operator networks, including AT&T Wireless. Cisco mobile gateways connect every Apple iPhone in the U.S. Other clients include Sprint, France Telecom/Orange, Turkcell, KDDI, and China Telecom. Along the way, Larry also turned around the Cisco service provider voice-over-IP business, transforming over $100 million annual losses into profitability through quality improvements, 40% Y/Y increase in bookings, expense reductions and offshoring.

Past Cisco product management and marketing responsibility included high-end routing, ATM, and the CiscoFusion architecture for switched internetworks.  Prior to joining Cisco, Larry was vice president of product management at start-up company Ipsilon Networks, where he helped pioneer IP switching, predecessor to Mutiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). Ipsilon was acquired by Nokia.

Larry received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Duke and an MS in Operations Research from Stanford.

Jeff Newman
As a longtime Silicon Valley executive, Jeff brings his vision, leadership quality and depth of strong alliances and relationships with an industry-wide global network to enabling the success of Catalyst. Based on his extensive experience in managing people to grow businesses, Jeff launched Catalyst Operating, LLC, in 1999, at the request of the venture capital community. Jeff designed Catalyst services to accelerate the time to market for technology companies via managed access to the Catalyst Fellow Network,TM a closely-managed global intelligence network of over 400 of the most influential senior corporate executives. Catalyst has been significant in the development and market entry of many venture funded companies as well as public corporations repositioning into new markets. Experienced Board member to many client companies, Jeff helped shape optimal corporate roadmap and growth strategy to 50+ companies.

Dixon R. Doll, Jr., Chief Operating Officer
Dixon Doll, Jr. is the Chief Operating Officer at Violin Memory, Inc and a member of the Board of Directors since September 2009.

Dixon was previously the Senior Vice President of Sales and Corporate Development at Fusion-io for one year from March 2008-February 2009.  He built the field sales team from infancy and led Fusion-io to its first 300 enterprise customers and 30 business partners as well as being an angel investor.

He is technology veteran of Oracle, New Era of Networks (NEON sold to Sybase), Recourse sold to Symantec and has won numerous awards for outstanding performance.  He is a start-up veteran working over 25 start-ups over the past decade as both an adviser, investor and operating executive.

He is a graduate of Georgetown University class of 1990 where he received his BA in Government, and The University of Michigan Graduate School of Business class of 1994 where he received his MBA.  He was a White House Intern in 1989.

Mark Rosenblatt – Chairman
Mark has been an active high-tech investor since 1995 in both private and public companies. His fund, Rationalwave Capital Partners, was an early investor in Violin. Mark became Chairman of Violin in mid-2008. In 1999, Mark co-founded Premium Wireless Services, Inc., the first fully legal ringtone company in the United States where he served as CFO. Mark has also worked as a technology investor at Lone Pine Capital and Omega Advisors, and consulted for McKinsey & Co.

He has a B.S.E.E. and an MBA both from Yale University. He also serves on the board of Metara, a chemical metrology company focusing on the water and semiconductor industries (www.metarainc.com).