Board of Directors

Billy Bosworth

Billy joined DataStax as Chief Executive Officer in May 2011 and propelled the company’s growth from sub-$1M in revenue and 25 employees to more than $100 million in revenue and over 500 employees today. 

He championed the company’s early years when it was the leading contributor of code and expertise to open source Apache Cassandra™. Now, he is leading the company’s enterprise expansion as the world’s premier provider of the always-on, distributed cloud database built on Apache Cassandra and designed for hybrid cloud. Billy is an active contributor to the Forbes Technology Council. He is a frequent speaker on the topics of cloud databases, data autonomy, hybrid cloud, AI and distributed workforces, and was most recently at The Economist Innovation Summit discussing AI and data trends shaping the future of global business. 

Billy’s 25+ years of tech experience span nearly every part of the database industry in roles ranging from database administrator, to book author, to senior executive. Before joining DataStax, Billy spent six years at Quest Software, where his most recent role was Vice President and General Manager of the database business unit. Under his leadership, the industry-leading Quest database business grew from supporting traditional relational databases to a portfolio that included tools for cloud, NoSQL, Columnar, and Hadoop databases, as well as business intelligence offerings. Prior to Quest, Billy spent a large portion of his career as a software engineer, ultimately moving into product management at Embarcadero Technologies. 

Billy holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Louisville, where he was also a scholarship football player for the Cardinals.

Kelly Battles

Kelly is currently the Chief Financial Officer at Quora, a company whose mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge, and a member of the Board of Trustees and Audit Committee Chair for the Wikimedia Foundation.

At Quora, Kelly leads the company’s finance, legal, IT, facilities, people operations and product operations efforts. Prior to joining Quora, Kelly was Chief Financial Officer of Bracket Computing for three years and Chief Financial Officer of Host Analytics for four years. She was the first finance hire at IronPort Systems and ran finance and operations as Vice President of Finance as the company evolved from a small startup to an enterprise generating hundreds of millions of dollars in bookings, and before IronPort was acquired by Cisco. Kelly was also a Director of Corporate Development at HP and started her career at McKinsey & Company and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Kelly holds an M.B.A. from Harvard University and a B.S.E. in Operations Research/Systems Management from Princeton University, both with honors.

Kelly has received numerous accolades for her work, including the YWCA TWIN Award for Women in Business and the Best in Biz Gold Award. She was also a finalist for both the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal Chief Financial Officer of the Year Award.

In addition to her professional work, Kelly has dedicated herself to advancing education and improving the lives of others. While at McKinsey & Company, she worked extensively with Habitat for Humanity, collaborating with founder Millard Fuller and key executives to improve domestic operations and develop international growth and governance strategies. From 2006 to 2011, she served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Bowman School, a non-profit Montessori school focused on inspiring children to love learning. She also has been an Elder and held other various leadership positions in her church, Valley Presbyterian. She currently serves as President and Board Member of the Bodnar Foundation, a private charitable foundation.

Jim Baum

Jim recently was President and Chief Executive Officer of Netezza, a data warehousing and analytics company. In 2007, he worked to take Netezza through an IPO, followed by 14 quarters of growth as a public company and ultimately driving its acquisition by IBM.

Prior to Netezza, Jim was President and later Chief Executive Officer of Endeca. While at Endeca (now owned by Oracle), he led the company’s rise from an innovative technology startup to the leading provider of compelling e-Commerce software solutions to the who’s who of major on-line retailers. He was one of the early employees of Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), joining prior to its IPO and taking on a diverse set of challenges over an 11-year period. Serving PTC in roles including product management, engineering, marketing, sales, support and services, Jim spent his last three years with PTC defining the company’s product lifecycle management strategy as the Executive Vice President and General Manager of its Windchill Business Unit. During his tenure at PTC, Jim helped bring the company to more than $1 billion in revenue.

In addition to serving on DataStax’s Board of Directors, Jim is currently a director for several companies including Applitools, Digital Alloys, Cazena, Logz.io, OpenView Venture Partners and Project44. He also serves as a Trustee of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

Eric Chin

Eric joined Crosslink in 2010 and focuses on Internet, software and cloud infrastructure companies.

He leads the Crosslink Capital Seed program and is also Co-Founder and President of Alpha, the entrepreneurial networking club for more than 850 Founders and Chief Executive Officers. Eric brings over 20 years of experience as a successful entrepreneur and venture capital investor. Prior to Crosslink, Eric was a partner at Artiman Ventures and Bay Partners focusing on Internet and software investments, some of which include Opsource (NTT), Invensense (INVN), InterAct and Dropcam (GOOG). Eric's startup experience includes co-founding the Internet server software company WebSpective (INKT), and co-founding TelASIC Communications (MTI).

In addition, his operating experience includes business development at Mainspring (IBM) and at MILCOM (Military Commercial Technologies) where he focused on finding and commercializing next generation technologies out of the military, aerospace and Defense Labs. In addition to DataStax, Crosslink Investments include: Descartes Labs, Hired, Casper, Jack Erwin, NodeSource, ProtectWise, Scripted, PowerToFly, TakeLessons, True & Co., Enigma, Comparably, Flo and Visually. Eric holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Jonathan Ellis

Jonathan is Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of DataStax.

He was Project Chair of Apache Cassandra for six years, where he built the Cassandra project and community into an open-source success. Previously, Jonathan built an object storage system based on Reed-Solomon encoding for data backup provider Mozy that scaled to petabytes of data and gigabits per second throughput.

Andy Vitus

Andy has been investing with Scale Venture Partners for 15 years and focuses on next-generation enterprise software and new data center technologies, including virtualization and cloud computing.

In addition to serving on DataStax’s Board of Directors, Andy also serves on the boards of CircleCI, JFrog, Matillion, PubNub, Realm, TechSee, Treasure Data, Unbabel and Unifi Software. He was previously on the board of directors of Stormpath, which was acquired by Okta.

An engineer at heart, Andy spends his free time coding, testing and trialing the software and technologies that interest him. Prior to joining Scale Venture Partners, Andy worked as an engineer for Electronics for Imaging, designing embedded print server platforms and video compression circuits. Andy earned an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

John Vrionis

John joined Lightspeed in 2006 and focuses primarily on information technology infrastructure, with a particular investment interest in datacenter technologies. He was named a Top Investor in the Cloud market by GigaOm in 2012.

In addition, John is the Founder of Lightspeed’s Summer Grant Program. Previously, he worked in product management and marketing with Determina (acquired by VMware). John was also an initial member of the executive team at Freedom Financial Network, where he helped design and implement the company’s customer relationship management software, drove its partnership strategy and managed the sales and marketing team.

In addition to serving on DataStax’s Board of Directors, John is privileged to be a continuing supporter of the management teams at Arctic Wolf Networks, Banyan Ops, Barefoot Networks, CloudBees, Drone Citadel, Kespry, Omnition.io, SnapRoute, Streamlio and Styra. John holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Harvard University.