Board of Directors

Violin Memory's board includes the following 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.

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 was previously the Senior Vice President of Sales and Corporate Development at Fusion-io.  He built the field sales team and led Fusion-io to its first 300 enterprise customers and 30 business partners. 

Previously Dixon founded Longstreet Ventures, a consulting company that provided angel investment capital and assisted CEO’s and Board of directors of startup companies in developing strategic options.  He worked with the CEO of Trapeze Networks and Revolution Partners during its acquisition by Belden in 2008.  He has made private investments in 25 technology startups since 2002

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.

Eric C. Cooper

Dr. Cooper is an investor and board member and was a co-founder and CEO of FORE Systems, Inc. He led FORE from its initial focus on ATM local-area networks to a leadership position in both enterprise and service-provider networking. He took the company public in 1994, and served as FORE's chairman until its acquisition by Marconi in 1999. When FORE was acquired for $4.5 billion, the company employed 2,000 people worldwide, generated $700 million in revenue, and earned $50 million in net income.

Eric Cooper received a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in mathematics from Harvard University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. In 1999, Dr. Cooper was appointed Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He also serves as a Trustee of Carnegie Mellon University and a Director of several technology companies.

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).
 

Donpaul Stephens, Chief Strategy Officer & Founder

Donpaul co- founded Violin in 2005 after identifying that the increasing demand in the market for high performance storage and scalable memory systems was not adequately addressed by any existing or foreseeable solution.

Donpaul has Masters and Bachelors of Engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and also received an Executive MBA from NYU. In his 14 year career, he has held engineering positions at Fore Systems, Ascend Communications and Bell Labs and was a General Manager at Vitesse. In 2000, he founded Xebeo which was acquired by UT Starcom.