After almost a decade at Cloudera, it is time to set sail for a new adventure. I had a great opportunity to join this famous, buzzing startup in the early days, with Cloudera at about little over a hundred employees. Back then, the office was hosted in a storage area behind Fry’s Electronics in Palo Alto, CA. Like all startups, it was chaotic to say the least. The journey since, and four office moves later, has been a rollercoaster of hard work, persistence, patience, and growth pains. The team’s dedication led to a ton of successes! The enrichment and rewards exceeded my highest expectations and they go way beyond monetary ones - and for that I will be forever grateful to all my coworkers and the Cloudera leadership over the years, and to all the amazing customers and partners with whom I have built deep relationships along the way.
My path has always been guided by my deep interest in technology and learning from inspiring people. Over the past few years I have had opportunities to engage with various startups in different forms. Nordic Innovation House of Silicon Valley invited me to be an official startup mentor in their TINC and REACH programs, helping Nordic innovators and startups to create viable products, prepare for scale, enter global markets, and sharpen go-to-market strategies. As part of Berkeley Angel Network and Women Angels of the Bay Area, I made my first seed investments. All these amazing interactions opened my eyes to a new way to give back, and it was incredibly rewarding at a personal level.
These experiences set me on a path to explore how to best leverage all the valuable experience from this unicorn adventure, all the way through IPO and Cloudera’s merger with Hortonworks. I debated co-founding or joining another startup, but then I met DNX Ventures. At DNX Ventures, the philosophy entails providing helpful navigation and valuable networks to entrepreneurs. Perhaps more importantly, they live and breathe a customer-centric approach to successful startup growth - it resonated deeply with my own product and customer leadership DNA. Something I have always let guide my product mission, but also became deeply rooted through the years heading up the Executive Advisory Board for Cloudera. I was convinced that moving into Venture with the DNX team lined up with both my passion and DNA - and yet on a new level of impact!
I am more than delighted to join the outstanding team at DNX, with its great track record in SaaS, Cybersecurity and DeepTech, to focus and build the Cloud and Enterprise sector in Fund III. This is an amazing opportunity that aligns with my next step - to help accelerate and scale success for many entrepreneurs!
On this new mission, I will look to help innovative technology entrepreneurs in rapidly Enterprise-transforming areas, some of which are:
No-code / less-code and API-based cloud-services
SaaS-based accelerated data value and automated, ML-enabled ETL
Engineering/DevOps 10x efficiency and cloud-cost control tooling
Over the next few months you will hear more from me about these areas and more, please stay tuned. Last, but not least, I very much look forward to hearing from you and learning what you think the next big thing is that will accelerate organizations' transition to a cloud-native, less-code, and auto cost-efficient infrastructure economy. Feel free to send me a note if you have an interesting or crazy idea you’d like to discuss!