Our Team

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before becoming the CIO of Instaclustr, Michael founded and managed credativ and its Open Source Support Center. He bootstrapped the company to become a multi-national specialist for open source services. In the process, he helped numerous businesses improve their IT infrastructure by using pure open source solutions. On the community side, Michael has been a developer for nearly 30 years working on different open source projects, including well-known solutions like Debian and PostgreSQL. He has also engaged in significant open source evangelism and given related presentations at various events. Michael teaches open source infrastructure components at a local university as an adjunct professor.

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.

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).

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.

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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