We are gathering developers and founders/leaders at developer-focused companies to discuss emerging tools and trends in the industry at Accel | Open Source. Attendees will meet industry peers and have the opportunity to hear leaders discuss open source business models, the founder journey, and more.Â
Casey Aylward joined Accel in 2022 and focuses on early-stage investments in cloud-native infrastructure, open-source software, and security companies.Â
Prior to joining Accel, Casey worked at Costanoa Ventures, an early-stage enterprise fund, where she led and incubated several investments in developer tools, data infrastructure, and security.Â
Before investing, Casey was a software engineer at Pinterest where she worked on commerce, collaboration, and core products. Casey joined Pinterest via an acquisition of a former Accel portfolio company, URX, where she was also a software engineer.
Casey graduated from Dartmouth College and is from Palm Beach, FL.
Laura Behrens Wu is the CEO and co-founder of Shippo, a leading shipping platform designed for growing e-commerce businesses. Laura co-founded Shippo in 2013 to help commerce businesses succeed after experiencing difficulties with shipping for her own eCommerce store. Today, Shippo works with more than 120,000 merchants directly who rely on Shippo for their day-to-day shipping.
Laura is passionate about making shipping easy and accessible for small businesses, empowering small businesses to be competitive in the marketplace, and has been recognized as part of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List and Inc.’s Female Founders 100 List.
Milin Desai is CEO of Sentry, the developer-first application monitoring platform used by over 3.5 million software developers at enterprise companies like Disney, Sonos, Peloton and more. Prior to joining Sentry, Milin was General Manager of Cloud Services at VMware where he was responsible for the company’s overall cloud strategy, including the transition to SaaS and expansion of its public cloud solutions.Â
Prior to this role, he started the network virtualization product line at VMware and grew NSX into a billion-dollar business unit for the company. Earlier in his career, he held engineering roles at Veritas and was an early employee at Riverbed.Â
Milin holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
Maya is a Product Manager at Tailscale, providing secure networking for the long tail. She was mostly recently at GitHub in software supply chain security, and previously at Google working on container security, encryption at rest and encryption key management. Prior to Google, she was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, working in IT security for large enterprises.
Maya completed her Master's in mathematics focusing on cryptography and game theory. She is bilingual in English and French.
Outside of work, Maya is passionate about ice cream, puzzling, running, and reading nonfiction.
Daniel Levine first joined Accel in 2010. He focuses on product-first startups aimed at consumers, developers, and bottoms-up business users.
Dan led Accel's investments in, and serves on the boards of, Gem, Mux, ReadMe, Scale, Sentry, Sprig, Vercel, and Whimsical.
He led Accel’s investments in Atrato, Beek, Monarch Money, Numeracy (acquired by Snowflake), and Searchlight. He also works with the teams at Bird, Checkr, Heptio (acquired by VMware), MessageBird, Rylo (acquired by VSCO), and others.
Dan re-joined Accel after spending time at Dropbox, where he worked on the platform team. He helped open the platform to third-party developers and launched and managed many of the company’s developer-facing initiatives. Earlier, Dan co-founded Chartio, a Y Combinator-backed (S10) startup in the data visualization space, and prior to Chartio, worked on CrunchBase at TechCrunch.
Dan is from Washington, DC and graduated from Yale.
Kim is a Founder and Head of Product at Chainguard. She started her career in the security space as an engineer working for Lawrence Livermore Labs, and most recently worked for Google. She launched a number of cloud enterprise products and created popular open source projects including SLSA, Security Scorecards, and Tekton.
Matthew McClure is a co-founder and VP of Developer Experience at Mux, a video infrastructure platform that provides best-in-class streaming, analytics, and more via an API developers love. He started and continues to organize both SF Video Technology, the group that launched dozens of local video meetups around the world, and Demuxed, the world's leading conference for video developers.
Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel where he leads the company’s mission to build a better web, faster. Prior to founding Vercel, Guillermo co-founded LearnBoost and Cloudup where he served the company as CTO through its acquisition by Automattic in 2013.
Originally from Argentina, Guillermo has been a developer since the age of ten and is passionate about contributing to the open source community. He has created a number of JavaScript projects including socket.io, Mongoose.js, Now, and Next.js.
Amy Saper joined Accel in 2019 and focuses on companies building delightful user experiences that target consumers, businesses, and developers.
Amy led Accel's investments in Gamma and Sprinter Health, and she works closely with the teams at Gem, Middesk, Deserve, and Radar.
Previously, Amy spent time at Stripe. As the second marketing hire, she helped build and grow the Product Marketing team, leading global product launches across Stripe’s suite of products. Prior to Stripe, Amy launched products and countries at Twitter, as she helped the company scale from a pre-revenue startup to a public company over the course of four years.
Prior to Accel, Amy was also an active angel investor, investing in and advising early stage companies in industries including e-commerce, health and wellness, and SaaS.
Originally from Palo Alto, California, Amy graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Amit joined Accel in 2016 and works with early-stage teams across a number of consumer, b2b, and developer-oriented categories. Areas of particular focus currently include web3, fintech, and digital health.
Amit has led Accel's investments in Headway, Chainalysis, Unit, Coast, Higo, Flink, Winden, Tailscale, Airbyte, Avenue, Smallstep, ModernLoop, FitOn, Mayhem, and Smash. He also works with the teams at UserTesting and Process Street.
Previously, Amit was an Accel entrepreneur as the co-founder of CardSpring, where he led engineering for its developer-facing API platform. Twitter acquired CardSpring, where he then led engineering for several of Twitter’s commerce initiatives.
Originally from Cupertino, California, Amit graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). Today, he leads the Accel Scholars program at Berkeley and sits on the EECS external advisory board.
Since 2008, Jana has been an early employee of developer tool startups, including Engine Yard, New Relic, HashiCorp, and now PlanetScale.
Jana worked at HashiCorp for almost seven years, beginning when it was a ten-person startup through the IPO, hired to build their offline and online community programs. The programs she launched helped create widespread awareness of their open source tools used by millions today.
She is also an angel investor and advisor.
Igor is a builder of developer tools and infrastructure for the Web. He enjoys working together with open source communities on making the Web a great platform for both end-users and developers. As co-creator of AngularJS and Angular, Igor has experience building communities and software for millions of developers.
Vas Natarajan joined Accel in 2010, and as a partner focuses on early-stage companies in the data infrastructure, API, and enterprise software spaces.
He led investments and sits on the boards of data platform companies like Segment and Radar; collaboration software companies like InVision, Ironclad, Blameless, Frame.io and Deepnote; and workflow automation companies like Catalyst, Transcend and atSpoke. He also spearheaded the firm's investments in VSCO (a mobile photography platform), Deepmap (HD mapping for autonomous vehicles), Skydio (autonomous drones), Propeller Aero (photogrammetry analytics) and Trace Data (a data observability platform).
Vas is active with Accel’s India practice and helps drive the firm’s Tech Council initiatives.
He is originally from Augusta, Georgia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.
Doug Merritt served as Splunk President and Chief Executive Officer from 2015 to
2021. During his tenure as CEO, Doug led the transformation of Splunk from an on premise, perpetual license software company with the equivalent of $220 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), to a cloud-based SaaS company with ARR of $3.12 billion. In his first year at Splunk, Doug served as the Senior Vice President of Splunk’s go-to-market functions including sales, marketing, support, business development, partners and other customer facing functions.
Prior to joining Splunk, Mr. Merritt served as Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions Marketing at Cisco Systems, Inc., a networking company, from 2012 to 2014. From 2011 to 2012, he served as Chief Executive Officer of Baynote, Inc., a behavioral personalization and marketing technology company. Previously, Mr. Merritt served as President of Products and Technology as well as a number of other executive roles and as a member of the extended Executive Board at SAP A.G., from 2005 to 2011. From 2001 to 2004, he served as Group Vice President and General Manager of the Human Capital Management Product Division at PeopleSoft Inc. (acquired by Oracle Corporation). He also co-founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Icarian, Inc. (since acquired by Workstream Corp.), a cloud-based company, from 1996 to 2001.
Mr. Merritt holds a B.S. from The University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.