Meet the Team
We’ve assembled some of the industry’s brightest with deep expertise in Venture Capital, CXO Innovation, Channels, Startups, Product Development, Sales, and Emerging Tech. Our foundation is built upon a fundamental belief in the power of inclusion for the benefit of all.
Chad Cardenas
CEO
Chad Cardenas is currently Founder & CEO of The Syndicate Group (TSG) as well as Managing Director of Syndicate Venture Partners. TSG has pioneered a new evolution of Venture Capital, helping startups scale faster by organizing exclusive investment access for their strategic ecosystem. Enterprise tech startups benefit from an ecosystem with more skin in the game while strategics get early looks at the best companies and unprecedented access to invest in them.
Having spent 25 years in the enterprise technology sector, he maintains a wealth of experience in sales, leadership, business transformation, innovation, distribution channels and go-to-market strategies for enterprise startups.
Natalie Pond
Operations
Natalie brings over 10 years of experience supporting executives, managing events, coordinating office operations, and helping teams stay organized across fast-moving business environments. Her background in social media and digital marketing adds a fresh, creative perspective to TSG’s go-to-market efforts with enterprise technology startups and the continued acceleration of strategic channel ecosystems. With experience coordinating a wide range of interactions across clients, executives, members, and organizational stakeholders, Natalie is skilled at managing competing priorities while maintaining a thoughtful, detail-oriented approach. At TSG, she brings strong attention to detail, thoughtful communication, and a high-touch service approach to building and maintaining relationships across the diverse ecosystem of portfolio companies, strategic investors, and venture capital partners.
Mohit Aron
Startup Advisory
Mohit Aron has over 15 years of success in building enterprise technology and companies. His groundbreaking achievements in developing scalable, high-performance distributed systems established his reputation as a thought-leader and top entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. As the Co-Founder/CTO of Nutanix, he helped create and fuel the major industry trend of hyperconvergence. In 2013, Aron founded his current company, Cohesity. Cohesity’s disruptive, software-defined technology is redefining how companies globally backup, manage, and derive insights from their data.
In 2016, CRN recognized Cohesity on the list of Storage Emerging Vendors You Need To Know, and named Cohesity as one of the Top 25 Disruptors. In 2017, Forbes included Cohesity in its list of Next Billion Dollar Startups. Prior to his work with Cohesity and Nutanix, Aron was a lead developer for the Google File System engineering project. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University with a focus on distributed systems. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi India.
Leonard Iventosch
Channels & Investment Strategy
Leonard has spent over 30 years as a senior executive leading and building high performing channel sales teams at companies like Data General, NetApp, ExtraHop Networks, Isilon Systems, EMC and Nimble Storage. In addition to setting the industry standard for channel sales leadership, Leonard is widely known for building strong, trusted executive relationships within the channel community. These relationships when paired with innovative, industry-first channel models and strategic programs have helped fuel massive channel growth for the OEM going to market as well as their
individual channel partners across the globe.
Dan Warmenhoven
Venture & Growth Strategy
Dan Warmenhoven is the former executive chairman and CEO of NetApp. Dan served as chief executive officer from 1994 to 2009 and executive chairman of NetApp from 2009 to 2014. Under Dan’s leadership, NetApp grew to become a multibillion-dollar company and a recognized market leader in networked storage, a concept the company pioneered. Dan led the company’s initial public offering in 1995. NetApp is consistently listed in the top 20 of FORTUNE magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work for in America and was ranked #1 in 2009.
Declan Morris
Technology & CXO Advisory
Declan Morris has more than twenty years of corporate leadership experience leading all aspects of IT and digital transformations across multiple sectors including financial, consumer, digital media, and enterprise software. With an exceptional background in both IT and Cloud services, Mr. Morris advises CEOs and technical advisory boards on digital enterprise strategies, cyber security, and building high-performance technology teams.
During his six years at Splunk, Mr. Morris served as Chief Information Officer where he
led the IT organization through an intensive hyper-growth period that saw revenues soar tenfold. Success is attributed to embracing a cloud-first strategy for all IT-related services and solutions to accelerate business capabilities. His organization also championed the internal usage of Splunk by showcasing security, operational insights, and business analytics capabilities.
John Jack
Venture & Board Strategy
Jack comes to the board with a wealth of knowledge around operations and leadership as well as venture strategy and investing. His career began in sales for Sybase and a decade as CEO for both Covalent and Fortify Software. When Fortify Software was acquired by HP, Jack spent an additional two years with the company. With this experience under his belt he became a Board Partner at Andreesen Horowitz where he has served on the board of directors for several notable companies such as CipherCloud, Illumio and Contrast Security.
Jeff Bawol
Strategic Channel Development
Bawol spent the majority of his career building and leading Avnet, a technology distributor and influential force in the industry. His involvement led him to not only SVP and General Manager roles but President of the Americas as well. Through these leadership positions he oversaw all operations and strategic direction of Avnet’s Enterprise Software and Solutions group, lead Avnet Technology Solutions’ business across the Americas region from both a strategic and operational perspective, as well
as oversaw over 25 supplier lines in the IT distribution channel.
You can find few others with this level of experience and in-depth knowledge of the distribution and channel partner ecosystem. He now spends his time sharing his expertise with a few select companies where he serves as board advisor.
Malcolm Harkins
Cybersecurity Advisory
Malcolm has dedicated his career to helping organizations understand and improve cyber risk management, winning multiple awards for security leadership, innovation, and excellence. He has been a featured speaker at industry events, authored books and articles on IT risk, taught at the UCLA business school’s CIO Institute, and testified on cybersecurity before the US Senate.
At Epiphany Systems, Malcolm is responsible for enabling client growth with optimal information security infrastructure, systems, policies, and processes. Before joining
Epiphany, Malcolm was Chief Security and Trust Officer at Cylance and Cymatic. He also previously served as Chief Security and Privacy Officer at Intel Corporation. He is on the boards of TrustMAPP and the Cyber Risk Alliance, and advises the Verizon Media Group, Arista Networks, SafeBreach, BlackCloak as well as other growth-stage cybersecurity companies.
Selim Aissi
Cybersecurity Advisory
Selim Aissi has advised and served on the boards of various technology companies, Venture Capital firms, and Security Institutions including the National Technology Security Coalition, FS-ISAC MRC (Chairman), State of California’s Cybersecurity Task Force, UC Berkeley CISO Institute, Bay Area CISO Executive Governing Body, and CISO Magazine.. He is a two-time CISO of the Year award recipient, holds over 100 patents in various areas of information security and he authored the book Security for Mobile
Networks and Platforms (Artech House).
Previous roles include SVP & CSO at Ellie Mae, and VP of Global Information Security at Visa where he transformed Visa’s information security program, led critical security programs including product security innovation, enabling global growth and datacenter expansion and various technology initiatives to protect Visa’s most critical data, networks, data centers, digital wallets, applications, and end-point devices.
Gary Brown
Go To Market Advisory
Gary has spent over 30 years advising, consulting and leading resellers and OEM technology sales growth in both product and professional services at companies like Forsythe Solutions Group, Salem Group and Piedmont Technology Group. He has led and helped high performance teams achieve rapid grow and profitable lines of business in record time. This includes technologies sectors such as storage, compute, networking, cloud, security and software. Gary has an extensive consulting and advisory background, helping companies achieve rapid transition or growth within a specific area of focus or timeframe, as well as plan and execute transition services agreement from mergers and acquisitions with companies like Trace3 and SecurityScorecard.
DJ Goldsworthy
CXO & Security Advisory
DJ Goldsworthy is Vice President of Security Operations and Threat Management at Aflac. He is responsible for driving the strategy for security operations, incident response, threat management, vulnerability management, security administration, application security and security engineering with a focus on global security practices. Prior to joining Aflac in 2015, Goldsworthy was Director of a financial services managed security services provider, where he implemented a 24/7 year-round security operations center and led the Research and Development division, delivering one of the market’s early advanced malware protection services.
Brandon Lee
Product Management & Development
Brandon Lee is the Co-Founder of 68 Labs, Inc., a creative tech agency, where he heads up the technology and product development. His consulting and entrepreneurial experience helps bring his client’s technology projects to life. Brandon previously founded a technology consulting and investment company, Denali7 Ventures. During that time, he lead business development and consulting operations. Denali7 worked with a variety of clients which included companies such as Toyota, Boeing, Thomson Reuters, Veterans Administration, Sysco, Capgemini, and Wipro guiding them through various aspects of technology development projects, process, and organizational structure.
Doug Kato
Product Management & Development
Douglas Kato is a strategic advisor of product planning and development for 68 Labs. He is also the Founder of Roots Holding, Inc. where he developed technologies that eventually became a revolutionary Social Fundraising Platform that serves in growing local communities together.
Prior to Roots, Douglas was the co-founder of Qmania®, Inc., where he sought to
develop a service that plugging into the growing smartphone market, would grow users while saving consumers, retailers, and producers money. Before Qmania, Mr. Kato founded Up Above Records in 1995.
