Leadership

Board of Directors

Jim Watson, CMEA Capital

Jim Watson is the Managing General Partner at CMEA Capital, where he specializes in software and services companies. Prior to joining CMEA, Jim was a founder and entrepreneur. He founded Skyway Systems, a high-tech services company. He was company President and leader behind the supply-chain strategy that twice landed Skyway on the Inc. Magazine list of fastest growing U.S. companies. Inc. Magazine also named Jim as one of the Entrepreneurs of the Year. Skyway, with over 1,300 employees and revenues above $100 million, was subsequently acquired by Union Pacific Corporation (UPN). Prior to Skyway, Mr. Watson was with IBM's large computer systems division. Jim graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland and served five years as a Navy pilot.

John Walecka, Redpoint Ventures

John Walecka is a Founding Partner of Redpoint Ventures and is passionate about companies with innovative business models. John has helped many entrepreneurs in the enterprise and broadband infrastructure spaces achieve success including: Entropic (ENTR), BCD Semiconductor (BCDS), Xylan (acquired by Alcatel), Wellfleet Communications (merged into Bay Networks), Synernetics (acquired by 3Com), Agile Networks (acquired by Lucent), Network Equipment Technologies (NWK), Polycom (PLCM), Onstream (acquired by 3Com), Avici Networks (AVCI), TransMedia Communications (acquired by Cisco), Lightera Networks (acquired by Ciena), Promatory Communications (acquired by Nortel), Netro (NTRO), StratumOne (acquired by Cisco) and Trapeze (acquired by Beldin). In addition, John has led investments in a number of software infrastructure companies, including Sybase (SYBS), Documentum (DCTM), Object Design (ODIS) and Vitria Technology (VITR). He has also been involved with Redpoint China companies Qihoo (QIHU), BCD Semiconductor (BCDS) and AMEC. John is currently a Director of the Stanford Business School Venture Capital Trust, an advisor to the Stanford Engineering School, and on the board of the SFMOMA. Prior to founding Redpoint, John was a general partner with Brentwood Venture Capital and worked at Hewlett Packard. John received a B.S. and an M.S. in Engineering from Stanford University and a M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Mark Siegel, Menlo Ventures

Mark Siegel has been with Menlo Ventures since 1996. His main areas of focus are next-generation datacenter infrastructure and cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and mobile applications. Prior to joining Menlo Ventures, Mark was a product manager for Oracle Corporation's Massively Parallel Processing Group. In this role, he was part of the team that developed and deployed one of the first true massively parallel and multi-threaded commercial software offerings — the Oracle Parallel Server. Eventually, Mark started and managed a consulting group at Oracle dedicated to customers of this product. Mark then went on to work for Netscape Communications Corporation from the first year of the company's inception through its IPO. Mark is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S. in Physics with Electrical Engineering) and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (M.B.A.), and currently serves on the Dean's Advisory Council of the MIT School of Science.

Dr. John Busch, Schooner CTO and Cofounder

Jerry Rudisin, Schooner CEO and President

Advisory Board

A sage once observed that "not all of the really smart people in the world can ever work for you," and that's definitely true of Schooner. We have a world-class team, and we learn a lot from our customers and their demanding workloads and production environments. We also have a roster of industry experts, including some of the leading authorities in databases and caching, who serve as formal advisors to Schooner.

Brian Aker, Open-Source Hacker

Brian Aker is a self-proclaimed open-source hacker who has made immense contributions to a wide range of projects including various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database. Brian was Director of Architecture at MySQL AB until it was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He later worked in Sun's research group on the Drizzle database project. Brian is now an industry consultant after Sun's acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2010.

Rick Cattell, Database Expert

Dr. R. G. G. "Rick" Cattell is an independent consultant in database systems and in engineering management. He previously worked as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, most recently on open-source database systems and proprietary innovations in database systems. Dr. Cattell served for 20+ years at Sun Microsystems in management and senior technical roles, and for 10+ years in research at Xerox PARC and at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Cattell is best known for his contributions to middleware and database systems &mdash particularly enterprise Java, object-oriented databases, object/relational mappings, and database interfaces. He is the author of several dozen papers and six books. He instigated Java DB and Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and was a contributor to a number of Enterprise Java APIs and products. He previously led development of the Cedar DBMS at Xerox PARC, the Sun Simplify database GUI, and SunSoft's ORB-database integration. He was a founder of SQL Access (a predecessor to ODBC), the founder and chair of the Object Data Management Group (ODMG), the co-creator of JDBC, the author of the world's first monograph on object/relational and object databases, and a recipient of the ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award.

Tom McWilliams, Cofounder and Schooner Fellow

Dr. Tom McWilliams is a cofounder of Schooner. He previously founded Pathscale, which developed a low-latency high-bandwidth InfiniBand system interconnect, and was acquired by QLogic in 2006. From 1996 to 2001 Tom was a distinguished engineer and principal investigator at Sun Microsystems, working on server architecture and advanced CAD tools. From 1993 to 1996, he managed microprocessor development and the MIPS architecture group at Silicon Graphics. In 1987, Tom founded Key Computer Laboratories, which designed one of the first superscalar pipelined computers. Key was acquired by Amdahl, where Tom served as VP in the systems architecture group until 1992. In 1981, Tom cofounded Valid Logic Systems, whose products were based around his Stanford Ph.D. work, and remained there as VP until 1989. He won the 1984 IEEE McDowell Award for creating the SCALD design methodology, the basis for many of the computer-aided engineering systems used today. Prior to Valid, he designed supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Peter Zaitsev, MySQL Expert and Cofounder of Percona

Peter Zaitsev is a world famous expert in MySQL performance optimization and scaling and one of Percona's founders. Peter has helped many companies ranging from one-man startups to Fortune 500 companies with their performance and scaling problems in various stages from architecture design to queries and schema optimization. Peter has spoken at many international conferences focused on MySQL, Open Source, databases, and high-performance Web applications. Before cofounding Percona Peter worked for MySQL AB as head of the High Performance Group. He was involved in support, consulting, development, and working with vendors helping to optimize their software and/or hardware to perform well with MySQL. Peter was also involved in a number of Web startups in roles ranging from CTO to consultant, and has a lot of experience in MySQL and Web applications, operations, deployment, quality assurance, and development.