Augusto “Aghi” Marietti is an inventor, technology entrepreneur and angel investor. As the CEO and co-founder of Kong, the cloud connectivity company on a mission to power connections to build a reliable digital world, he drives the company’s vision, strategy and long-term growth. Prior to Kong, he was the CEO and co-founder of Mashape, the largest API marketplace, which was acquired by RapidAPI in 2017. Before that, he founded MemboxX, the first European cloud service for storing documents and sensitive personal data. Augusto holds a B.S. in Economics from the Catholic University of Milan and studied briefly at UC Berkeley. He is the lead inventor on five U.S. patents and an angel investor in more than 10 startups.

Marco Palladino is an inventor, software developer and Internet entrepreneur based in San Francisco. As the CTO and co-founder of Kong, he is Kong’s co-author, responsible for the design and delivery of the company’s products, while also providing technical thought leadership around APIs and microservices within both Kong and the external software community. Prior to Kong, Marco co-founded Mashape in 2010, which became the largest API marketplace and was acquired by RapidAPI in 2017.

David (DP) Pieterse is an accomplished and modern field leader with experience building high performing teams over the last 20 years across the globe. He is responsible for building and leading all revenue functions for Kong, including operations, sales development, direct and inside sales, enablement, sales engineering, channel, field marketing and customer experience. Prior to Kong, he was leading the Americas field team for Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) and was instrumental in driving this business back into growth mode. Prior to Cloudera, he was leading Vertica, then part of HP (NYSE:HPQ), and took the EMEA business into hyper-growth before being bought out by MicroFocus. David has a love for doing oil paintings, cooking, climbing mountains, and snowboarding whilst many sunny weekends are kept for surfing down in Santa Cruz with his family and two dogs.

Ken Kim is a serial entrepreneur and experienced startup executive. As the VP of business development for Kong, he oversees business and corporate development activities for the company. Ken has held leadership roles across sales, services, and business and corporate development at various technology companies, which include Citrix, Cloud.com, Symantec, Vontu, E2open, KANA and Accenture. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University.

Janet Phillips is the People leader at Kong, driving talent, people ops and culture programs to support Kong’s explosive growth. She is an experienced technology business leader, having held leadership positions in multiple disciplines, including HR, Technology Education Services, Customer Success and Support, M&A Integration, Field Sales and other roles in Fortune 500, mid-size and start-ups, including Ciber, Sonicwall, Vontu and Symantec. Janet holds a B.A. degree in Communications from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.

Geoff Townsend is a startup veteran with nearly 20 years of experience. He has held engineering leadership roles at various companies that were acquired by Lyris, IBM and Cisco. Prior to joining Kong, he was the director of engineering for R&D/Product at OpenDNS, where he played an important role in growing it from $5 million to $100 million in average rate of return. A big fan of Agile, Geoff realizes most people do it wrong — Agile simply means making the fewest product guesses before getting feedback from customers. He holds a degree in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and lives just outside of Blackhawk, CA.

Reza Shafii is a seasoned product executive in the infrastructure and middleware space. His early career was as a software engineer at Nortel Networks as well as a technical consultant at BEA Systems. During this time, Reza fell in love with Product Management and has since led Product at a number of successful enterprises, including the first Product Management hire at MuleSoft, VP of product at CoreOS, and through acquisition, GM and VP of platform services for OpenShift at Red Hat. In his spare time, Reza still gravitates to writing code for fun and clears his head by taking on the beautiful bike roads of the Bay area.