René is an executive-in-residence based in Battery’s Menlo Park office. A 35-year technology-industry operating executive, he has had a front-row seat for most of tech’s major transition points, working in senior executive roles at Silicon Valley companies including Ingres, Oracle, Business Objects, SAP, Salesforce and Palo Alto Networks. Most recently, before joining Battery, René—who got his start in technology when he founded a software business in his home country of the Netherlands in 1983—worked in senior executive roles at cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks. He served as its founding chief marketing officer (CMO) for 10 years, growing the company from a tiny startup to one with nearly $3 billion in annual revenue. René also played a key role in the company’s initial-public offering in 2012 and served for a year as executive vice-president of strategic accounts. Before Palo Alto Networks, he was a senior vice-president at Serena Software, Salesforce.com and SAP, as well as CMO of Business Objects and a senior vice-president of worldwide marketing at VERITAS Software. Prior to that, René’s experience was focused on databases. He joined Oracle Europe in 1992 as the company’s international marketing lead; then, four years later, former CEO Larry Ellison convinced him to move to Silicon Valley. There, he ran marketing for Oracle’s technology business, including the Oracle database and developer program, and developed Oracle’s internal CRM stack. He joined Oracle from INGRES, where he ran European product marketing for eight years. His first software-development business, started in 1983, used the Ingres database system first developed at the University of California at Berkeley. Over the years, René has also carved out a niche as a go-to advisor for many startups, including Armis, Acronis, Bionic, Bitwarden, Nexthink and others. René holds a degree in economics, with an emphasis on mathematics, from Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit and speaks four languages. He is also a devoted Star Trek aficionado.

Dominic Orr has an impressive track record of leading some of the industry’s most successful and innovative companies, taking them from venture-backed startups to high valuation IPOs and acquisitions. Most recently, Dominic was President of Aruba Networks, an HPE company. Prior to Aruba’s acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dominic served as the company’s Chairman and CEO from an early stage startup in 2006 through a successful public offering on the Nasdaq in 2007, through the HPE deal in 2015. Prior to Aruba, Dominic was president of the Personal Internet Group at Nortel networks following its 2001 acquisition of Alteon WebSystems, an industry leading network infrastructure company that Dominic led as Chairman and CEO from its beginnings in 1996 through the Nortel acquisition, including an historic Nasdaq IPO in 1999. Dominic has also served as a board director for a number of companies, including Chairman of the Board of Ruckus Wireless from 2004 to 2009. Dominic has a BS in Physics from the City College of New York, and a Master of Science and PhD from Caltech. Dominic received the Distinguished Alumni honor from Caltech in 2010.

Alex is the Founder of Ten Eleven Ventures, the industry’s first venture capital fund that is focused solely on investing in digital security. Alex has been in security, software and finance roles in Silicon Valley for over 20 years. He was the co-founder of PGP Corporation serving as board member, COO, CFO and VP Business Development from 2002 until its sale to Symantec in 2010. He has continued his involvement with security companies as an angel investor, independent director, entrepreneur-in-residence at Khosla Ventures, and private equity firm consultant with KKR. Alex received his MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania’s Management & Technology program with a B.S. in Systems Engineering from the Moore School and a B.S. in Finance from the Wharton School.

Dharmesh joined Battery Ventures in 2015 to focus on early-venture and growth-equity investments in areas including cloud infrastructure, big data, security and next-generation enterprise applications. Prior to Battery, Dharmesh was a managing director at Intel Capital, where he led the firm’s global cloud and big-data practice and made early- and later-stage investments in companies globally. Before joining Intel Capital, Dharmesh spent almost a decade in product management and go-to-market roles with enterprise-software companies like Keynote Systems, Manhattan Associates and two other startups leading to their acquisition. In 2016, Dharmesh was named to the Forbes Midas Brink list of up-and-coming venture capitalists, and in 2018 he was included on Business Insider’s 23 Top Venture Capitalists in Enterprise Tech list. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he received a BS in electrical engineering, Dharmesh also holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

As a founding partner at Wing Venture Capital, Peter led investments in dozens of early stage companies, more than 25 of which have gone on to complete IPO’s or successful acquisitions including Nimble Storage, Redback Networks, Riverbed, Arrowpoint Communications, and Infinera. Before founding Wing, Peter helped lead Accel Partners for 15 years as Managing Partner. Peter holds an A.B. in Physics from Harvard College, summa cum laude, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar.

Gnanaprakasam has more than 20 years of product and engineering leadership experience and is also a serial entrepreneur. Before founding Ordr, he was the Chief Development Officer at Aruba, responsible for all of engineering and product management functions. Aruba, an enterprise mobile wireless company, was acquired by HPE for $3 Billion in March 2015. Before Aruba, Gnanaprakasam served as the head of engineering for Cisco’s multi-billion-dollar Wi-Fi business unit and before that as VP of engineering for low-end switching product lines. He graduated with a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Chennai, India and holds several patents to his credit in various networking technologies.