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Charles Giancarlo is a highly regarded technology veteran with four decades of experience in the technology industry. As CEO of Pure Storage and senior executive at Cisco Systems for 15 years, Giancarlo has been named CEO Monthly Magazine’s “CEO of the Year” and ranked among Network World’s “Top 50 Most Powerful People in Networking” for four consecutive years.

In addition, under Charles’ leadership, for five years in a row, Pure Storage has been named as a Fortune Magazine’s Best Workplace in multiple categories, named a Most Loved Workplace by Newsweek, and recognized as one of the top 100 Bay Area Corporate Philanthropists by the San Francisco Business Times.

Giancarlo is currently CEO of Pure Storage, Inc. Pure Storage is the inventor and leader in enterprise flash storage systems. One of the fastest-growing enterprise IT companies in history, Pure Storage enables customers to quickly adopt next-generation technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to help maximize the value of their data for competitive advantage. Pure Storage today can satisfy all of an enterprise’s storage needs, from the most cost-sensitive to the highest performance, with a single, consolidated flash operating environment and a cloud operating model that requires one-tenth the space, power, cooling, and labor of traditional magnetic disk-based systems.

Prior to Pure Storage, from 2008 to 2013, Giancarlo was a Managing Director of Silver Lake Partners, the world’s largest technology investor where he was also head of value creation, managing a group of executives that work to improve the operations of the firm’s portfolio companies and management teams. At Silver Lake, Giancarlo co-led Silver Lake’s acquisition of Skype from eBay and operated as Executive Chairman of Skype during its revival and eventual sale to Microsoft. He also operated as interim CEO of Avaya.

Prior to Silver Lake, Giancarlo was second in command at Cisco Systems. Giancarlo came to Cisco in 1994 when it acquired Kalpana Networks, where Giancarlo was Chief Product Officer. Kalpana invented and marketed the world’s first Ethernet switch. Giancarlo held a succession of positions at Cisco Systems from 1994 to 2007. His last position was Executive Vice President, CTO, and Chief Development Officer of Cisco. In this role, he led all of Cisco’s product development and product management activities, including all product and market strategy. He led over 30,000 employees, including over 24,000 development engineers, representing more than half of all Cisco employees and almost $40 billion of product sales.

During his career at Cisco, Giancarlo played a leadership role in all of the company’s major customer segments, including the commercial, service provider, enterprise, and consumer businesses, and in the development and execution of Cisco’s business strategies for these important customer segments. Giancarlo was also responsible for the creation of many of Cisco’s product lines and businesses, including Ethernet switching, security, unified communications, wireless networking, digital video and TelePresence, consumer networking, and Cisco’s initial channel strategy. Additionally, Giancarlo established a process for the consistent development of new businesses within Cisco.

Giancarlo is best known for his groundbreaking work in developing new technologies and markets. He was the driving force behind the creation and success of many common technologies in use today, including Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switching, Ethernet switching, network security, load balancing, Wi-Fi, voice over IP and IP telephony, network access control, and TelePresence. With TelePresence as a typical example, Giancarlo conceptualized the product, formed the engineering and marketing teams, and led the development of the product and go-to-market strategy behind its successful growth.

Giancarlo holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Brown University where he served as a trustee, an MSEE from the University of California at Berkeley where he serves on the board of advisors, and a master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School. He has served on the boards of Accenture, Netflix, ServiceNow, and Avaya, and currently serves on the boards of Arista, Zscaler, and several startup companies.

John Colgrove, or Coz, is Founder and Chief Visionary Officer at Pure Storage, responsible for developing and executing Pure Storage’s global technical strategy.

Coz co-founded Pure Storage in 2009. Prior to this, he was the Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. It was there he observed the growing acceptance of solid-state storage by enterprises.

Coz was one of the founding engineers at Veritas Software, which merged with Symantec in 2005, where his 20-year career culminated as Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for the Data Center Management Group.

He was the primary architect for the hugely successful Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and Veritas File System (VxFS) and later served in various other engineering, management, and consultative roles.

Prior to Veritas, Coz worked for Amdahl Corporation where he was a key contributor to the development of the UTS mainframe UNIX operating system kernel.

He holds over 300 patents in the areas of computer system and reliable data storage design. Coz has a Bachelor of Science degree from Rutgers University.

Rob Lee serves as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Pure Storage, focused on global technology strategy, and identifying new innovation and market expansion opportunities for Pure.

Rob joined Pure in 2013 as part of the FlashBlade founding team and led the software architecture and development, from concept to launch, for the product which has eclipsed $1B in business.

Prior to Pure, Rob was an Architect at Oracle, where he worked on programming language runtimes for the Oracle RDBMS, as well as high-performance distributed transaction processing systems. During his 12-year tenure at Oracle, he focused on improving the performance, reliability, and programming models behind large-scale distributed systems.

Rob holds over 75 patents in the areas of distributed systems, language runtimes and storage systems.

He currently serves on the board of directors for Bay Area Underwater Explorers and Cordell Marine Sanctuary Foundation - non-profits dedicated to the exploration and conservation of Northern California underwater resources.

Rob holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lynn Lucas joined Pure Storage in December 2023 as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), leading the global marketing organization. She is responsible for creative strategies that amplify brand awareness, drive demand for the company’s technology portfolio and services, and deliver compelling customer experiences.

Lynn brings 25 years of go-to-market expertise for B2B organizations across hybrid cloud, software and infrastructure markets.

Prior to Pure, Lynn was CMO at Cohesity where she built the global marketing function and was a key leader driving scale in a hyper growth environment, while navigating a successful shift to SaaS. While there, she was selected as one of the Fearless 50 customer-led marketers of 2023. An advocate for diversity in tech, she co-led the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Council and was executive sponsor for the Women’s ERG.

Lynn’s previous roles included CMO at Veritas and Good Technology, and executive leadership positions at Cisco Systems, culminating as Vice President, Collaboration Solutions for the $5B unified communications, telepresence and Webex portfolio.

Lynn holds a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Niki Armstrong serves as the Chief Administrative and Legal Officer at Pure Storage, overseeing worldwide administrative functions, including legal, compliance, corporate governance, privacy, ESG, as well as the People function encompassing DEI, talent acquisition, and the Pure Good Foundation. Prior to this role, Niki served as General Counsel, as well as the Vice President of Global Employment Law, Ethics & Compliance, and Litigation at Pure. 

Prior to Pure, Niki’s career spanned a broad spectrum of technology companies including eBay, Cypress Semiconductor, Flextronics, Auction.com, and Nutanix. She also served as a law clerk to District Chief Judge Lee J. Romero, Jr. (ret.) of the U.S. Department of Labor and spent a number of years as an employment defense litigator at Gordon Rees Scully & Mansukhani LLP. 

Niki received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and her Juris Doctor from Loyola University.

Oz Pearlman is the most sought after mentalist and renowned mentalist in the United States. He developed an interest in magic at a young age and what started as a hobby evolved into a lifelong passion. After a few years working on Wall Street, Oz decided to pursue his dream and become a full time entertainer. He has now been dazzling audiences with his mind reading ability for nearly three decades!

Oz amazed the world on TV’s #1 rated show, America’s Got Talent. Week after week, he performed mind blowing mentalism routines never seen before and quickly became a fan favorite, winning third place out of thousands of acts. In 2018, he joined an elite few, including David Blaine and David Copperfield, to have their own TV special on a major national network. Oz Knows aired on NBC multiple times to rave reviews. The following year he won an Emmy Award for that special. 

Oz has had over 100 other television appearances that have aired on both national and international networks, including dozens of appearances on the TODAY Show, Ellen Degeneres Show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Harry Connick Jr. Show, Rachael Ray, Dr. Oz, CNBC Squawk Box, ABC World News, ESPN, CNBC, NFL Network, Bravo, Fox Business and many more.

When he isn’t blowing the minds of audiences around the world, Oz is an avid marathon and ultra-marathon runner, having completed such grueling races as the Badwater 135 Miler, Hawaii Ironman World Championships, Western States 100 and Spartathlon. He takes great pride in his marathon PR of 2 hours and 23 minutes and has won dozens of races throughout the country. In April 2022, he was featured on the cover of the New York Times for breaking the world record for most miles ever run around Central Park in a single day (116 miles) while raising over $100,000 for Save The Children’s Ukraine Relief Fund. Later that year he broke the record for fastest ever crossing of Long Island by foot, running from Montauk to Manhattan in 21 hours on the hottest of the summer no less.