Meet Our Leaders
Exabeam’s mission is to light the way and unleash security teams and organizations by removing the obstacles of outdated tech, rigid mindsets, and talent shortages to make security success the norm. Not an easy task, but worth the fight.
Leadership Team
Michael DeCesare
Chief Executive Officer & PresidentMichael DeCesare is CEO and President of Exabeam. Prior to Exabeam, DeCesare served as CEO and President of ForeScout Technologies and continues to serve as a board member with this leader in Enterprise of Things security. Prior to ForeScout, DeCesare spent eight years at cybersecurity giant McAfee, serving four years as President and four years as SVP of Worldwide Sales and Operations. DeCesare has also served in SVP and worldwide sales leadership roles at Documentum, EMC, and Oracle over the course of his career in cybersecurity. He holds a B.A. in Communications from Villanova University.
Ralph Pisani
PresidentRalph Pisani is President of Exabeam. Pisani leads all global sales and marketing go-to-market functions at Exabeam. With 20 years of experience in sales, channel, and business development, Pisani is widely recognized as one of the top security sales leaders in Silicon Valley. Prior to Exabeam, Pisani led the worldwide sales organization at cybersecurity firm Imperva from early stage through the company’s successful IPO. Prior to Imperva, Pisani served as Vice President of Worldwide OEM Sales at SecureComputing (acquired by McAfee) and Regional Vice President of Sales and Vice President of Channel and Business Development for CipherTrust (acquired by SecureComputing). Pisani also has held global sales leadership roles with Sophos, Inc., HR Logic, Inc. and EMDS Consulting, Inc. Pisani has a B.A. in Business from Bentley University.
Pedro Abreu
Chief Operating OfficerPedro Abreu is Chief Operating Officer of Exabeam. Abreu leads worldwide business operations, customer success, and support teams at Exabeam. With more than 20 years of industry-leading operational and management experience, Abreu is recognized as a thought leader among customer and partner communities and has a proven track record of scaling global organizations. Prior to Exabeam, Pedro served as Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Forescout, where he led corporate strategy, business operations, engineering, R&D, and product management functions. Prior to joining Forescout, Pedro was Senior Vice President of Strategy and Go-To-Market Operations at McAfee. In addition, he has held several senior-level strategy and operations roles at EMC, Documentum, and McKinsey. Pedro earned a MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and a CS in Computer Science from Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal.
Chris Cesio
Chief Revenue OfficerChris Cesio is Chief Revenue Officer at Exabeam where he leads the worldwide sales organization and is responsible for aligning all revenue-generating departments. With more than 20 years of experience in sales and channel management, Cesio is a veteran cybersecurity sales leader in Silicon Valley. Prior to Exabeam, Cesio was VP of Worldwide Business Development and Channels at cloud access security broker company Skyhigh Networks (acquired by McAfee). Prior to Skyhigh Networks, Cesio was VP of Cloud Solutions and Strategic Channels at data and application security vendor Imperva, where he also held various other sales and sales leadership roles. Cesio also held a number of sales management positions throughout his career at organizations including Lucent Technologies and Unisphere Networks (now Juniper Networks). Cesio has a B.A. in Business Administration from California State University, Chico.
Gianna Driver
Chief Human Resources OfficerGianna Driver is Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) at Exabeam. As CHRO, Driver manages the strategy and processes related to building, investing in, and retaining top talent at Exabeam, enabling employees to do their best work. She is responsible for architecting the company’s talent strategy, driving corporate culture and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and leading the global human resources function. Driver brings nearly 20 years of executive human resources management experience in small, large, private, and public global companies to Exabeam. Prior to Exabeam, Driver was the Chief People Officer at BlueVine, a private fin-tech company based in Redwood City, CA. Before BlueVine, Driver led HR and People functions in high-growth technology, gaming, consumer, and SaaS organizations including Playstudios, Aristocrat, Actian Corporation, Talend, and Balsam Brands. She is passionate about building high-performance cultures, establishing operational excellence, and creating joy at work. Driver is a graduate of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Adam Geller
Chief Product OfficerAdam Geller is Chief Product Officer at Exabeam. Geller leads product strategy, product management, research, engineering and business development for Exabeam. His focus is on identifying and solving critical customer challenges with innovative and easy-to-use solutions. Geller has worked across multiple security domains over the past 20+ years including network security, identity and access management, encryption, data protection, and security assessment and risk management. Most recently, Geller was Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering at Palo Alto Networks responsible for the VM-Series virtualization platform and the secure access service edge (SASE) and cloud access security broker (CASB) services of Prisma Access and SaaS. Geller has a degree from Cornell University and maintains both the CISSP and CISM security industry certifications.
Holly Grey
Chief Financial OfficerHolly Grey is Chief Financial Officer of Exabeam. Grey has over 25 years of experience in high growth technology companies. Prior to Exabeam, Grey was SVP Finance at Forescout Technologies where she was responsible for all financial and accounting operations and led Forescout through its successful initial public offering. Before Forescout, Grey was SVP Finance at Accuray Incorporated, a publicly traded medical device technology company. Prior to Accuray, Grey was VP Finance at Aspect Software, leading the organization through impressive growth, including multiple M&A transactions. Grey started her career in public accounting at Arthur Andersen and earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting at Boston College.
Allwyn “Olly” Lobo
Chief Development OfficerAllwyn “Olly” Lobo is Chief Development Officer at Exabeam. An innovator with decades of experience running cloud engineering and SecOps for global organizations, Lobo leads the global Engineering and Cloud Operations organizations for Exabeam. Prior to Exabeam, Lobo was Worldwide Vice President Cloud Ops, Infrastructure, Site/Service Reliability and Release Engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). While there he built a global Infrastructure Engineering, SRE and SecOps organization focused on automated multi-cloud orchestration (GCP, AWS, and Azure), ultimately transforming HPE to as-a-service building the first Infra Cloud Platform for HPE products to run on cloud or on premises. Before HPE, Lobo worked for several SaaS companies across various industries and is a contributing inventor and holder of multiple patents for online shopping, payment, and browsing technologies that are used by the world’s largest banks and merchants. Lobo holds a M.A. in Economics from the University of Pune, a B.Tech in Engineering from the Institute of Technology in Pune, India and has completed graduate-level Computer Science coursework at Stanford University.
Sherry Lowe
Chief Marketing OfficerSherry Lowe is Chief Marketing Officer at Exabeam. Lowe leads the global marketing organization for Exabeam and is a 20-year veteran of technology companies in Silicon Valley. Prior to joining Exabeam she was most recently the Chief Marketing Officer of Expanse, acquired by Palo Alto Networks. Before Expanse, Lowe was the Chief Marketing Officer of Druva, a cloud data protection company. Lowe also served as Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Splunk for six years, was a key member of the pre-IPO team, and built and led corporate marketing during its transition to a public company. She is also an award-winning print and broadcast journalist. Lowe received a B.S. in Journalism from Arizona State University and a Masters in English from Indiana State University.
Nir Polak
Chairman of the Board and Co-founderNir Polak is Chairman of the Board and Co-founder of Exabeam. Polak was formerly Chief Executive Officer at Exabeam and has more than 18 years of experience in information security, including executive experience setting company strategy, driving execution, building new products, and bringing them to market. Prior to Exabeam, Polak set the company product strategy, and launched and managed the worldwide services organization at cybersecurity firm Imperva. He also held engineering positions at Adjungo Networks (acquired by Flash Networks) and Shopping.com (acquired by eBay). Polak has a Bachelor of Arts degree in computer sciences from The Interdisciplinary Center in Israel.
Gorka Sadowski
Chief Strategy OfficerGorka Sadowski is Chief Strategy Officer at Exabeam. In his role, Sadowski assists the executive team and functional leaders across the company with developing, communicating, executing and sustaining corporate strategic initiatives. Sadowski has more than 30 years of security experience spanning leadership roles across product management, sales, marketing and operations. Most recently, Sadowski was senior director and security and risk management analyst at Gartner driving coverage for security information and event management (SIEM), security operation center (SOC), and managed detection and response (MDR), while also leading research for IT leaders on emerging topics. Prior to Gartner, Sadowski led business development at Splunk where he established and built the Splunk security ecosystem. Prior to Splunk, Sadowski established presence for LogLogic in Southern Europe, ran security activities for Unisys in France and launched the first partner-led intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) in the industry as lead for NetScreen’s Emerging Technology efforts. A certified CISSP, Sadowski received a computer science degree from Universite de Pau in France before moving to the U.S. as a Ph.D. candidate in network security at the University of Miami.
Board of Directors
Michael DeCesare
Chief Executive Officer & PresidentMichael DeCesare is CEO and President of Exabeam. Prior to Exabeam, DeCesare served as CEO and President of ForeScout Technologies and continues to serve as a board member with this leader in Enterprise of Things security. Prior to ForeScout, DeCesare spent eight years at cybersecurity giant McAfee, serving four years as President and four years as SVP of Worldwide Sales and Operations. DeCesare has also served in SVP and worldwide sales leadership roles at Documentum, EMC, and Oracle over the course of his career in cybersecurity. He holds a B.A. in Communications from Villanova University.
Nir Polak
Chairman of the Board & Co-founderNir Polak is Chairman of the Board and Co-founder of Exabeam. Polak was formerly Chief Executive Officer at Exabeam and has more than 18 years of experience in information security, including executive experience setting company strategy, driving execution, building new products, and bringing them to market. Prior to Exabeam, Polak set the company product strategy, and launched and managed the worldwide services organization at cybersecurity firm Imperva. He also held engineering positions at Adjungo Networks (acquired by Flash Networks) and Shopping.com (acquired by eBay). Polak has a Bachelor of Arts degree in computer sciences from The Interdisciplinary Center in Israel.
Theresia Gouw
Founder, Acrew CapitalTheresia Gouw was a co-Founder and partner at Aspect Ventures. Prior to Aspect, Theresia was a Managing General Partner at Accel. Theresia has been fortunate to work with many successful companies through IPOs or acquisitions including: Forescout (FSCT), Imperva (IMPV), Trulia (TRLA), Hotel Tonight (AirBnB), Astro (Slack; WORK), LearnVest (Northwestern Mutual), Jasper Design (CDNS) and Kosmix (WMT).
As an entrepreneur, Theresia was founding VP of Business Development and Sales at Release Software, a venture-backed company that provided SaaS to enable digital rights management and payment technologies for the software industry. Earlier, she worked at Bain & Company and as a product manager at Silicon Graphics.
Theresia led early investments in Cato Networks, Deserve, Exabeam, The Muse, Crew, ShieldX and PredictHQ.
Theresia is a first generation immigrant and a passionate supporter of educational causes and increasing diversity in the tech industry. Theresia was named to Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women list, has been recognized 8 times on the Forbes Midas List, including 2019, was named one of the 40 most influential minds in tech by Time Magazine, as well as being named to the Carnegie Corporation’s annual Distinguished Immigrants list.
Matthew Howard
Managing Partner, Norwest Venture PartnersMatt has over 25 years of experience in marketing, product management, engineering, business development, and sales in a wide range of technologies. Matt has appeared on the Forbes Midas List as a top 100 investor for three years and was recently recognized by Business Insider as one of the “19 Best Enterprise Tech Venture Capitalists.” He was also featured on AlwaysOn’s list of “Power Players in the Cloud.”
Matt currently serves on the boards of Avere Systems, Bitglass, Blue Jeans Network, Bluenose Analytics, ConteXtream, Exabeam, Exablox, Hadapt, MobileIron (NASDAQ: MOBL) and Pertino Networks. Previously, Matt was on the board of Airespace (acquired by Cisco Systems), Morta Security (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Omneon (acquired by Harmonic), Reconnex (acquired by McAfee), Retrevo (acquired by Shopzilla), Skystream Networks (acquired by Tandberg Television), SpectraLinear (acquired by Silicon Laboratories), Spinnaker Networks (acquired by Network Appliance), Summit Microelectronics (acquired by Qualcomm), Swan Labs (acquired by F5 Networks) and Webstacks (acquired by Extreme Networks). He was a board observer with FireEye, Veraz Networks (Nasdaq: VRAZ), Yipes (acquired by Reliance/Flag Telecom) and ZettaCom (acquired by IDT). He previously served on the board of the Wireless Communications Alliance (WCA).
Mark Jensen
Audit Committee Chair, Board of DirectorsMark Jensen is the Audit Committee Chair on the Exabeam Board of Directors. He is also a member of the Board of Directors and Audit Committee Chair of Lattice Semiconductor Corporation, (NASDAQ LSCC) a developer of low power programmable semiconductor design solutions. He served as an executive of Deloitte & Touche LLP and held a variety of positions, including U.S. Managing Partner-Audit and Enterprise Risk Services, Technology Industry and U.S. Managing Partner-Venture Capital Services Group. Prior to joining Deloitte & Touche LLP Jensen was an executive at Arthur Andersen LLP, and served as the Managing Partner of the firm’s Silicon Valley Office and leader of the firm’s Global Technology Industry Practice. Jensen has served on the Board of Directors of Unwired Planet, Inc. (formerly Openwave Systems Inc.) from 2012 until 2015, Control4 Corporation from 2015 to 2019 and Forescout Technologies, Inc. from 2013 to 2020. He is an active investor in private technology companies and is a member of the Board of Directors for various early stage privately held companies. Jensen received a Bachelor of Education Degree from Colorado State University and a Bachelor of Science Degree from Metropolitan State College of Denver.
Shlomo Kramer
CEO, Cato NetworksIn 2006, Shlomo was selected by Network World magazine as one of 20 luminaries who changed the network industry. He is the founder and CEO of Cato Networks and previously was founder and CEO of Imperva. Prior to founding Imperva, he co-founded Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. in 1993. At Check Point, he served in various executive roles and as a member of the board of directors through 2003. While at Check Point, Shlomo played a key role in defining and creating several category-defining products and solutions, including FireWall-1, VPN-1, FloodGate-1, Check Point’s OPSEC alliance, and Check Point’s security appliance program.
He has participated as an early investor and board member in a number of security and enterprise software companies including Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Trusteer (Acquired by IBM), Watchdox, and Worklight (Acquired by IBM). Shlomo received a Masters degree in Computer Science from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.
Ravi Mhatre
General Partner, Lightspeed Venture PartnersRavi is a Founder and Partner of Lightspeed and focuses on investments in enterprise IT, mobility, and Internet and cloud-based services and applications. Ravi has 17 years of venture capital experience and before entering venture capital he ran a product management group at Silicon Graphics and also worked in management consulting at Booz Allen and as a software engineer for BDIS, a Silicon Valley biotech instruments manufacturer. His current investments include Nutanix, AppDynamics, Natera, Mulesoft, Sailpoint, Edgespring, TheFind and Kixeye. Ravi has been recognized as a Top 100 dealmaker on Forbes’ Annual VC Midas List. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, and an MBA from Stanford University.
Jeb Miller
General Partner, Icon VenturesJeb joined Icon Ventures in 2009 as a General Partner, bringing 15+ years of experience working with early-stage technology companies as a venture capitalist, operating executive and investment banker. He also serves as a consultant to the Defense Venture Catalyst Initiative program of the US Department of Defense. His prior experience includes senior executive roles at Morgan Stanley Technology Ventures, ComVentures, Worldview Technology Partners, and the Carlyle Group. Jeb gained his operational experience as Managing Director of Business Development for Scient, a pioneering Internet consulting firm.
There’s work to be done
We look for the best and brightest in the security space. Let’s keep raising the bar together.