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Our Team

  • Leadership team
  • Board
  • Investors

Benjamin Levin

Chair of the Board

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Jerry Stesel

Director

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Peter Nichol

Consulting Executive

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Ben Bromhead

Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder

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Nick McNaughton

Non-Executive Director

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David Kirk

Director

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Peter Lilley

Chief Executive Officer

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Steve Francis

CRO & EVP GTM Operations

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Ben Bromhead

Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder

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Geoff Richardson

Chief Financial Officer

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Ben Slater

Chief Product Officer

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Doug Stuart

Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder

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Patricia Tantow

Chief Marketing Officer

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Evita Davies

SVP Finance

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Adam Zegelin

SVP Engineering and Co-Founder

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Nick McNaughton

Non-Executive Director

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David Kirk

Director

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Level Equity

Level Equity

Level Equity is a private investment firm. Through its growth equity and structured capital business lines, Level invests in and acquires outstanding growth businesses. The firm has raised $1.7 billion in committed capital in support of this strategy. Level aims to be the investor of choice for entrepreneurs and business with many options for capital.

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Our Innovation Fund LP

Our Innovation Fund LP

Our Innovation Fund, LP is a leading Australian based venture capital firm that invests in innovative high growth technology businesses with world class teams.

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ANU Connect Ventures

ANU Connect Ventures

ANU Connect Ventures manages a seed investment fund on behalf of the ANU-MTAA Super Venture Capital Partnership. The fund invests in early-stage commercial opportunities arising out of research at the ANU, other ACT-based research institutions and local R&D companies.

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Bailador

Bailador

Bailador is a specialist investor in the information technology and media sectors. The investment team has over 50 years of combined corporate, private equity and expansion capital investing experience, and the Board Directors are experts in their fields, bringing a wealth of capability to the table.

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Benjamin Levin

Chair of the Board

Ben Levin founded Level Equity and is a partner and the co-CEO of Level Equity Management, LLC. He has been an investor in growing media, software, and services companies since 1997 and is a frequent speaker on the growth equity industry. Prior to Level Equity he was Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners and previously held positions with Mentmore Holdings Corporation, the private investment arm of a New York City-based family office, and in the mergers and acquisitions division of Salomon Brothers. Ben graduated from Harvard College.

    Jerry Stesel

    Director

    Jerry is a founding partner of Our Innovation Fund, LP and an Investment Committee member. He has extensive investment banking, legal, and technology investing experience. Most recently, Jerry worked at Deutsche Bank and CBA advising some of Australia’s largest and fastest-growing companies on company transforming transactions. Jerry founded and successfully exited a payment services business in 2016. Jerry holds a combined Bachelor of Commerce and Laws (with Distinction) from UNSW and completed the Executive Management Program at Columbia Business School, New York.

      Peter Lilley

      Chief Executive Officer

      Peter is CEO and a Co-founder of Instaclustr.  He has more than 25 years of experience and expertise in information technology services, both as a business leader and implementer of customer solutions.  Peter previously led Stratsec, a specialist cybersecurity business, as CEO from startup through growth and onto successful exit in 2011.  At Stratsec, he had responsibility for all aspects of the business from its foundation in 2003, its growth across Australia, and into South East Asia culminating in the naming of Stratsec as Australian Business of the Year in 2010, along with several other cybersecurity awards.  In 2011, Stratsec was acquired by BAE Systems with Peter taking on a senior cyber leadership role until the founding of Instaclustr in 2013.  Peter is now applying his experience in growing great companies to building and scaling Instaclustr.

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      Peter Nichol

      Consulting Executive

      Peter has over 25 years of experience in software and service companies from startups to big enterprises in the $1B range. He held the position of CEO at Instaclustr, taking the company from an early-stage startup in 2015 to a team of more than 110 people. Prior to Instaclustr, Peter was GM of Platform Computing, which was acquired by IBM in 2012. He then managed the business for IBM until 2014. He has also successfully managed companies through several business phases including IPO and acquisition by larger companies.

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      Steve Francis

      CRO & EVP GTM Operations

      As Chief Revenue Officer & EVP GTM Operations, Steve is responsible for all go-to-market functions including Sales, Customer Success, Sales Engineering, Marketing, Consulting & Instaclustr Labs.

      Steve has experience leading large sales teams with revenue responsibility in excess of $100M in markets including hybrid cloud, ERP, SDN virtualization, database, and middleware.  Before joining Instaclustr he led US Commercial sales for SDN and Cloud Management at VMware.

      Steve earned his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management where he was a Sloan Fellow.  His undergraduate degree is from the University of Washington.

      Steve lives in Seattle, Washington and is a lover of the outdoors and keen on boating in particular.
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      Ben Bromhead

      Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder

      As Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder at Instaclustr, Ben sets the technical direction for the company. Ben is located in our California office and is active in the Apache Cassandra community.

      Prior to Instaclustr, Ben had been working as an independent consultant developing NoSQL solutions for enterprises and was running a high-tech cryptographic and cybersecurity formal testing laboratory at BAE Systems and Stratsec.

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      Geoff Richardson

      Chief Financial Officer

      With more than two decades of CFO experience steering financial operations at ASX200 Companies, Geoff leads Instaclustr’s financial team. He served as CFO of SAI Global, the global risk management company operating in 30 countries. At SAI Global, Geoff navigated the enterprise’s finances through a period of rapid growth as SAI’s valuation increased ten-fold over ten years, ultimately leading to a $1 billion acquisition by Baring Private Equity Asia. He also brings extensive M&A experience, having completed more than 20 domestic and international acquisitions there-by contributing to SAI Global’s growth.

      Most recently, Geoff served as the interim CFO at Macquarie Telecom Group, one of the Australia’s leading data centre, cloud and telecom companies. Prior to that, Geoff had been the Interim CEO and CFO at Ardent Leisure, the Sydney-based leisure and entertainment asset group.

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      Ben Slater

      Chief Product Officer

      As Chief Product Officer, Ben is charged with steering Instaclustr’s development roadmap and overseeing the product engineering, production support, open source, and consulting teams.

      Ben has over 20 years experience in systems development, including previously being lead architect for the product that is now Oracle Policy Automation, and over 10 years as a solution architect and project manager for Accenture. He has extensive experience in managing development teams and implementing quality controlled engineering practices.

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      Doug Stuart

      Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder

      Doug is a Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder at Instaclustr. He also leads Instaclustr Labs, an initiative designed to grow and leverage our enabling services capabilities, capture new and innovative ideas, and extract value from our extensive deep technical experience and body of knowledge. Before this role, Doug led the marketing division at Instaclustr.

      Prior to Instaclustr, Doug was a Co-founder of Stratsec, a world-class, highly awarded and recognized cybersecurity consulting, testing, and research firm, which was acquired by BAE Systems in 2011. Stratsec was awarded Telstra Business of the Year in 2010. Doug has also been recognized as a leading entrepreneur in the industry through the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Program in 2010.

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      Patricia Tantow

      Chief Marketing Officer

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      Evita Davies

      SVP Finance

      Evita works with the Leadership and Operations team to deliver accounting, tax, and financial capability. Evita is a Chartered Accountant with over 15 years experience across a number of industries, working previously for the accounting and advisory firm PwC and at an ASX listed company. Evita is based at the Canberra, Australia office.

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      Adam Zegelin

      SVP Engineering and Co-Founder

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      Nick McNaughton

      Non-Executive Director

      Nick is the CEO of ANU Connect Ventures, the venture arm of the Australian National University. Nick has a long track record of helping to build and grow early-stage companies, and has been a successful angel investor, business mentor, and CEO of a successful investment fund. Nick currently sits on the Board of Entry29, a co-working space for Canberra start-ups and the GRIFFIN Accelerator (also based in Canberra).

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      David Kirk

      Director

      David is the former Chief Executive of ASX-listed Fairfax Media Ltd., where he led the successful investment into a number of internet businesses including Fairfax’s acquisition of Trade Me and Stayz. David has been a growth stage investor in technology-based businesses since 1999. He is Chairman of ASX-listed Trade Me Group Limited and Kathmandu Holdings Limited, a Director of Forsyth Barr Limited—a privately-owned New Zealand investment firm, and a Director of  SiteMinder, SMI, and Viocorp.

      Prior to entering the corporate world, David enjoyed a highly successful rugby career, captaining the All Blacks to win the World Cup in 1987. He was awarded an MBE in 1988.

      David is a Rhodes Scholar with degrees in Medicine from Otago University, and Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University.

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      Paul Brebner

      Technology Evangelist

      Since learning to program on a VAX 11/780, Paul has extensive R&D and consulting experience in distributed systems, technology innovation, software architecture and engineering, software performance and scalability, grid and cloud computing, and data analytics and machine learning.

      Paul is the Technology Evangelist at Instaclustr. He’s been learning new scalable technologies, solving realistic problems, and building applications, and blogging about Apache Cassandra, Spark, Zeppelin, and Kafka.

      Paul has worked at UNSW, several tech start-ups, CSIRO, UCL (UK), and NICTA. Paul has helped pre-empt and solve significant software architecture and performance problems for clients including Defence and NBN Co. Paul has an MSc in Machine Learning and a BSc (Computer Science and Philosophy).

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