Meet our management team
Mark Davis
Chief Executive Officer
Mark has been at the center of the networked storage and virtualization revolutions since their inception. He launched the industry’s first Fibre Channel disk array in 1994, and was instrumental in growing Sun Microsystems from a non-player to the largest Unix storage vendor within five years. After a stint as VP of marketing at $2B storage vendor StorageTek, Mark repositioned ConvergeNet as the inventor of SAN-based storage virtualization, resulting in a $340M acquisition by Dell. After an instrumental role in the IPO of Evolve Software, Mark returned to the storage industry, working on multiple virtualization projects. Before co-founding Virsto, he was CEO of storage resource management vendor Creekpath, where he engineered its acquisition by Opsware (now HP).
Alex Miroshnichenko
Chief Technology Officer
Alex’s knack for creating innovation in virtualization and storage dates from the early 1990s, when he joined a tiny company of storage pioneers called Veritas Software. In a dozen years there, he established himself as a brilliant technologist at the core of major innovations ranging from the Veritas File System and Database Edition for Oracle, to the industry’s first viable storage software appliance technology and early explorations of a then-nascent virtualization technology called Xen. Alex was one of the backbone engineers as Veritas (now Symantec) grew from an inconsequential startup to a $2B giant. After Veritas, Alex became VP of engineering and CTO of digital archiving provider PowerFile, then served as CTO at backup software vendor Acronis. In 2007, Alex’s experience gave him unique insight into the problems of storage management under virtual servers, leading him to co-found Virsto.
Serge Pashenkov
Vice President Engineering
Time and again over the past two decades, Serge has demonstrated a talent for building software development teams from the ground up, and for inventing advanced technology to deliver the simplest solutions. Most recently, he did it at PowerFile, where he hired the team, led the design, and managed delivery of three major releases of on-spec and on-time system software for a sophisticated data archive appliance. Serge also innovated at Veritas Software, where his advanced technology teams delivered a patented fault-tolerant software platform, a content-aware storage system, and new levels of application scalability for modular computing. Also at Veritas, he ran engineering for the industry’s first software-only, network attached storage platform. Serge is a veteran of several startups in the storage, networking, and telephony industries; Virsto is his first as a co-founder.
Gregg Holzrichter
VICE PRESIDENT MARKETING
Gregg brings 20 years of marketing success with leading companies in server virtualization (VMware), CRM (Siebel Systems), ERP (PeopleSoft), customer experience management (Medallia), and consumer packaged goods (Robert Mondavi/Caliterra). At Siebel, Gregg helped build one of the most admired go-to-market organizations in the industry. He held a leadership role in product marketing at PeopleSoft, responsible for worldwide marketing for financials ERP. Gregg led VMware’s global campaigns and operations, in addition to Americas marketing, scaling his organization from less than $100 million to over $1 billion in revenue in under 4 years. Most recently, as VP marketing, Gregg established a new marketing organization, positioned Medallia as the leading CEM vendor, and delivered a 250% increase in pipeline within 12 months.
Eric Burgener
VICE PRESIDENT PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Eric has worked on emerging technologies for almost his entire career, with early stints at pioneering companies such as Tandem, Pyramid, Sun, Veritas, ConvergeNet, Mendocino, and Topio, among others, on fault tolerance and high availability, replication, backup, continuous data protection, and server virtualization technologies. Over the last 25 years he has worked across a variety of functional areas, including sales, product management, marketing, business development, and technical support, and also spent time as an Executive in Residence with Mayfield and a storage industry analyst at Taneja Group. Before joining Virsto, he was VP of Marketing at InMage.
Mike Gigante
Chief Scientist
Mike joined Virsto in 2011 through the acquisition of EvoStor, a VMware-focused storage systems company he co-founded in 2007. He has over 25 years of experience in the computing industry that combines academic research, product development and engineering management. Mike spent ten years at RMIT University where he was director of the Advanced Computer Graphics Center. He subsequently was the engineering director of file serving technologies for the global information and data storage company Silicon Graphics, where he was responsible for setting the strategic direction for network storage products and led a 30 person research and development team. He has contributed to more than 20 research publications and conference presentations. Mike has a BEng in aeronautical engineering from the University of Sydney, and a BSc in computer science from the University of Melbourne.
Kaycee Lai
Vice President Sales
Kaycee’s specialty is taking to market disruptive storage and virtualization software technologies in startups and publicly traded companies. Before Virsto, as VP of sales at database virtualization pioneer Delphix, Kaycee delivered triple digit revenue growth in his first four quarters. Prior to that, Kaycee invested 5 years in developing the nascent deduplication software market. He was instrumental in growing Avamar to the point of motivating EMC to purchase the company for $165M. After joining EMC (for the second time in his career), Kaycee led Asia Pacific and Japan sales for the company’s $120M backup, recovery, and archive portfolio, where he produced exceptional sales growth. Kaycee also played a key role in Microsoft’s capturing 50% of the NAS market. Kaycee earned his bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in Claremont, California.
