Leadership

You have achieved the pinnacle of career achievement after decades of hard work and become one of the most respected executive leaders in Silicon Valley. What do you do for a curtain call?

For Pankaj Patel, the decision to co-found Nile as a disruptive startup was the only logical answer. A self-proclaimed “geek,” he doesn’t dwell or take solace in past achievements; his passion for contributing to the world and to the industry that has given him so much is what drives him.

Nile’s commitment and strength lie in making overly and unnecessarily complex networking infrastructure solutions simple – this is Pankaj’s vision. Leaning on his obsession and superpower of customer delight, he is spearheading a culture here at Nile which values transparency, diversity of thought, leadership accessibility.

Prior to Nile Pankaj was a partner and Chief Strategy Officer at JC2 ventures, and a senior advisor to March Capital. Before that, Pankaj was Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer at Cisco Systems, Inc where he served for nearly 14 years. As the engineering head of the company’s $38 billion product and solution portfolio, he drove the business and technology strategy across Cisco’s entire product offerings.

Pankaj also serves on the board of directors of several technology startups.

Bill Choi serves as the CFO of Nile, bringing over 25 years of experience in the technology industry, with a unique background in corporate finance and capital markets. He has a proven track record of developing strategic plans and initiatives that drive sustainable growth and maximize shareholder value. Before Nile, Bill was Senior Vice President of Strategic Finance and Investor Relations at Zscaler, where he led their successful IPO in 2018 and helped guide the company’s industry-leading rapid growth to over $2B in ARR. Prior to moving to a corporate role, Bill built and led technology sector research practices at leading Wall Street investment banks, focusing on disruptive technologies and their transformative effects on various industries.

He earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). Bill is driven by a passion for lifelong learning and a commitment to driving positive change and achieving collective success.

Suresh Katukam is the Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Nile. Internally, Suresh is endearingly referred to as the “Chief Disrupter” due to his unending drive to tackle seemingly unsolvable problems. Suresh has infused this attitude into Nile’s culture, creating a company-wide obsession to both reimagine and redefine the decades-old field of networking.

Suresh has over 20 years of leadership experience across engineering, product management, business development, and M&A from notable technology leaders including Cisco, Aruba Networks, and AWS. At AWS, Suresh led Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Internet of Things technology partnerships.

Suresh’s innovative mindset is evident in his work. He has co-authored technology standards, published AI research papers, and has 40 patents in networking and security. Suresh has an M.B.A. from the Anderson School of Management, UCLA, an M.S. in C.S. from Arizona State University, and a B.S. in Computer Science from BITS, Pilani, India.

Scott Gainey joined Nile in June of 2021 as Chief Marketing Officer overseeing the creation and execution of the company’s marketing strategy, and development of its global brand. Scott brings over 20 years of marketing experience to Nile, gained while serving as CMO and other leadership positions for some of the most innovative and disruptive technology companies including Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Cisco, and NetApp.

Scott is driven by a competitive spirit which has naturally driven him to take on roles within challenger brands. This spirit is what attracted him to Nile and its focus on disrupting an industry complacent in complexity. An opportunity to play an integral role in bringing value to customers eager for a more simple, secure, and reliable network experience.

Scott received his B.S. from Cal Poly Humboldt, business and leadership studies from Stanford GSB and West Point’s Thayer Leadership Development Group.

Sri Hosakote is the Chief Development Officer and co-founder of Nile. He brings more than 25 years of business, technology, and executive management experience. In that time Sri built multiple products from the ground up that ultimately generated multi-billion-dollar revenue streams for some of the world’s leading networking and technology companies.

Before Nile, Sri held SVP and EVP roles at notable companies like Infinera, Seagate, and Cisco. At Cisco, he held multiple senior leadership positions across various networking groups leading small teams to large organizations. He is particularly proud of building and delivering the most compelling routing platform at Cisco, the ASR9000.

Sri has a passion for being in the trenches while leading teams to think outside of the box to deliver what customers need. His decision to help launch Nile stems from his confidence that the company will upend traditional business and technology models. His love for creativity and pushing paradigms are foundational to what Sri strives for in his teams to deliver on and create the best customer experience with Nile.

His passion for inspiring and helping people extends beyond the corporate framework. Sri is also an advisor for various companies. Sri cares deeply about education and guest lectures at universities. Near and dear to his heart, Sri is actively engaged in initiatives for children with special needs. Sri holds a B.S and M.S in Computer Science and MBA in technology management.

Stephen brings more than 20 years of experience in building world class sales and partner organizations, in both developed and emerging markets. Prior to joining Nile, Stephen was CRO of Ubicquia, a leading supplier of smart infrastructure to cities, utilities, and mobile operators. Prior to Ubicquia, he was SVP/GM of Americas for both HERE Technologies and Extreme Networks, leading all aspects of the GTM Strategy across all sectors.

Stephen spent the first 15 years of his career at Cisco, leading sales organizations in both the U.S and Asia Pacific regions. While based in Singapore, he served as the Managing Director for Cisco’s Service Provider business in Asia Pacific, Japan, and China, and prior to that held multiple leadership positions managing AT&T, which grew to be a multi-billion dollar relationship. Stephen holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Texas in Austin.

Niraj Singh is a seasoned executive renowned for his ability to drive business growth and transformation. As the Chief Business Development Officer at Nile, he continues to excel in delivering exceptional results.

Niraj’s journey in the telecommunications and enterprise sectors is marked by a series of remarkable achievements. Notably, as Senior Vice President at Frontier Communications, he played a pivotal role in orchestrating the successful post-bankruptcy restructuring of the Enterprise & Government segment, demonstrating his strategic acumen and operational finesse.
During his tenure as Vice President of Enterprise Sales at T-Mobile/Sprint, Niraj managed substantial enterprise sales revenue and introduced a comprehensive portfolio of wireless and IoT solutions. He also exhibited his multifaceted leadership by overseeing the nationwide Business Individual Liable team.

Niraj’s international experience includes multiple roles at Vodafone in India, Qatar and London, where he served as EVP and Chief Business Officer, managing Vodafone’s largest corporate and public sector clients, including the United Nations, European Union, U.S. government, and NATO. His career journey has also encompassed influential positions at Lucent Technologies and Eltec.
Niraj holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and an MS in Engineering from Ohio University.

As a Product Management & Customer Experience executive at Google, YouTube, Netflix, Cisco and other Fortune 500 companies, Surbhi has spearheaded visionary product and engineering teams over the last two decades.

Surbhi started her journey in the networking industry at HP, Cisco and Force10 Networks, and went on to build & launch the very first Networking products at GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Venturing into the consumer space, she led YouTube & Google Home initiatives and launched multiple groundbreaking products, incorporating cutting-edge AI and machine learning technologies.

Currently, in her operations leadership role at Nile, she focuses on all aspects of Customer Experience including service delivery, customer success and customer support. She brings her automation and ML-based personalization approach to enhance every facet of the customer journey to help Nile retain and scale their growing customer base.

A fervent advocate for inclusion and diversity, Surbhi spearheads many Global Inclusion & Diversity initiatives. Beyond her professional pursuits, she is deeply committed to giving back to the IIT and the Women in Tech community. Some of her community engagements include IIT AI/ML Forum lead for 1800+ strong alumni, National Board Member at ASEI, Board member at IIT Foundation, Chapter lead at Women in Product. She also mentors and advices various Tech/AI startups.

Surbhi’s academic journey includes a B.Tech, Aerospace Engineering from IIT Kanpur and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. She has also earned a General Management Program Exec degree from Harvard Business School (HBS).

You have achieved the pinnacle of career achievement after decades of hard work and become one of the most respected executive leaders in Silicon Valley. What do you do for a curtain call?

For Pankaj Patel, the decision to co-found Nile as a disruptive startup was the only logical answer. A self-proclaimed “geek,” he doesn’t dwell or take solace in past achievements; his passion for contributing to the world and to the industry that has given him so much is what drives him.

Nile’s commitment and strength lie in making overly and unnecessarily complex networking infrastructure solutions simple – this is Pankaj’s vision. Leaning on his obsession and superpower of customer delight, he is spearheading a culture here at Nile which values transparency, diversity of thought, leadership accessibility.

Prior to Nile Pankaj was a partner and Chief Strategy Officer at JC2 ventures, and a senior advisor to March Capital. Before that, Pankaj was Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer at Cisco Systems, Inc where he served for nearly 14 years. As the engineering head of the company’s $38 billion product and solution portfolio, he drove the business and technology strategy across Cisco’s entire product offerings.

Pankaj also serves on the board of directors of several technology startups.

John Chambers is founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures, where he focuses on helping startups from around the world build and scale. He invests in companies that are leading market transitions, such as ASAPP, Aspire Food Group, Balbix, Bloom Energy, Cloudleaf, Dedrone, IoTium, Lucideus, OpenGov, Pensando, Pindrop, Privoro, Quantum Metric, Rubrik, SparkCognition, Sprinklr, and Uniphore. He serves on the Board of Directors for Bloom Energy, OpenGov, Pindrop, Sprinklr, and Uniphore.

Prior to founding JC2 Ventures in 2018, Chambers spent 25+ years with Cisco, serving as CEO, Chairman and Executive Chairman. He currently holds the title of Chairman Emeritus of Cisco.

Chambers is the author of Connecting the Dots: Lessons for Leadership in a Startup World, where he shares lessons for lasting success in the Digital Age.

Chambers is the Chairman of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) and the Global Ambassador of the French Tech under French President Emmanuel Macron.

Sumant is a Co-Founder & Managing Partner of March Capital. Sumant leads investments in cloud driven enterprise platforms, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML, and network infrastructure as well as companies supporting the Indian market. In his two decades of venture capital, Sumant has generated multiple meaningful exits in companies that he has either incubated or been the first institutional investor.

Sumant’s previous exits include CarTrade Tech (NSE: CARTRADE), VeloCloud (acquired by VMware), Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), Kosei (acquired by Pinterest), Appcito (acquired by A10 Networks), Deep Forest Media (acquired by Rakuten), Kazeon Systems (acquired by EMC), Mimosa Systems (acquired by Iron Mountain), Ankeena Networks (acquired by Juniper), Cetas (acquired by VMware), Apture (acquired by Google), and Perspica Systems (acquired by Cisco). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of market-leading technology companies Extend, Nile, SparkCognition, and Uniphore.

Additionally, Sumant is a co-founder of two leading technology incubators in the San Francisco Bay Area: The Hive, focused on AI and Blockchain driven companies, and The Fabric, focused on cloud, IoT, and network infrastructure companies. He has helped incubate more than 25 companies throughout his career. In 2000, Sumant joined Clearstone Venture Partners and became a Managing Director four years later. Prior to Clearstone, Sumant spent more than eight years as an entrepreneur, starting companies in both India and the United States.

Sumant has an M.B.A. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. He is a Charter Member of TiE, and a Member of the US India Strategic Partnership Forum.

Current Investments: BillDesk, Extend, Nile, SparkCognition, Uniphore, Xage

Joe Lonsdale is a technology entrepreneur and investor. He is the managing partner at 8VC, a US-based venture capital firm that manages several billion dollars in committed capital. He was an early institutional investor in many notable technology start-ups including Oculus (acq.FB), Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), Oscar (NYSE: OSCR), Illumio, Anduril, Wish (NASDAQ: WISH), JoyTunes, Blend (NASDAQ: BLND), Flexport, Joby Aviation (NASDAQ: JOBY), Cityblock, Orca Bio, Qualia, Synthego, RelateIQ (acq.CRM), and many others. Joe has been on the Forbes 100 Midas List since 2016 and was the youngest member included in 2016 and 2017, and ranked 18th in the world last year.

Before focusing on institutional investing, Joe co-founded Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) a global software company known for its work in defense and other industries, as well as for providing the platform to run the COVID-19 common operating picture for key decision makers in over 35 countries. After Palantir, he founded and remains as Chairman of both Addepar, which has over $3 trillion USD managed on its wealth management technology platform, and OpenGov, which provides software for over 2,000 municipalities and state agencies. More recently, he is also a co-founder of Affinity, Epirus, Resilience Bio, and other mission-driven technology companies, which he continues to create with his team out of the 8VC Build program. Joe began his career as an early executive at Clarium Capital, which he helped grow into a large global macro hedge fund. He also worked with PayPal while he attended Stanford.

George Kurtz is the CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, a leading provider of next-generation endpoint protection, threat intelligence, and services. Kurtz is an internationally recognized security expert, author, entrepreneur, and speaker. He has more than 29 years of experience in the security space, including extensive experience driving revenue growth and scaling organizations across the globe. His entrepreneurial background and ability to commercialize nascent technologies have enabled him to drive innovation to market throughout his career. His prior roles at McAfee, a $2.5 billion security company, include Worldwide Chief Technology Officer and GM as well as EVP as EVP of Enterprise.

Prior to joining McAfee, Kurtz started Foundstone in October 1999 as the founder and CEO responsible for recruiting the other founding team members. Foundstone, a worldwide security products, and services company, had one of the leading incident response practices in the industry and was acquired by McAfee in October of 2004. Kurtz has been quoted or featured in many major publications, media outlets, and television programs including CNN, Fox News, ABC World News, Bloomberg, CNBC, New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Associated Press, Network World, and many others. He also authored the best-selling security book of all time, Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets & Solutions.