Board of Directors

Chet Kapoor

Chet Kapoor is Chairman and CEO of DataStax. He is a proven leader and innovator in the tech industry with  more than 20 years in leadership at innovative software and cloud companies, including Google, IBM, BEA Systems, WebMethods, and NeXT. As Chairman and CEO of Apigee, he led company-wide initiatives to build Apigee into a leading technology provider for digital business. Google (Apigee) is the cross-cloud API management platform that operates in a multi- and hybrid-cloud world. Chet successfully took Apigee public before the company was acquired by Google in 2016. Chet earned his B.S. in engineering from Arizona State University.

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.

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.

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).

Jonathan Ellis

Jonathan is a co-founder of DataStax. Before DataStax, Jonathan 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.

John Vrionis

John is the founder and managing partner of Unusual Ventures and focuses on early-stage Enterprise Software and Consumer Technology startups. 

He was previously a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, where he focused primarily on information technology infrastructure, with particular investment interest in datacenter technologies. He was named a Top Investor in the Cloud market by GigaOm in 2012. In addition, John was 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.

Kelly Battles

Kelly is an advisor 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.

She was also previously a CFO at Quora, where she led 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.