What Makes a Great VP of Engineering

Martin Casado is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise investing. He was previously the cofounder and chief technology officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin served as senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business by the time he left VMware in 2016.

Martin started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired his work at Stanford where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, leading to a new paradigm of network virtualization. While at Stanford he also cofounded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006.

For his work, Martin was awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Martin serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: ActionIQ, Astranis, DeepMap, Imply, Kong, Pindrop Security, RapidAPI, SigOpt, and Yubico.

Sonal Chokshi is Editor in Chief at Andreessen Horowitz, aka "a16z", which she joined 5 years ago to build and run the editorial operation. Among many other things, this includes building and showrunning the popular a16z Podcast; assigning and editing pieces such as "When One App Rules Them All" on the case study of WeChat and China, which was selected in the New York Times' Sidney Awards 2015 as one of the best long-form essays (for "brilliantly marrying psychology, intellect and technology"); leading production of the a16z Crypto Canon; and many more.Before joining a16z, Sonal was a Senior Editor at Wired, where she built up the previously flailing expert opinion and ideas section into one of the leading sections there. She was one of the first mainstream editors to feature then-emerging trends such as ethereum, e-sports, the 'sharing economy', and others. Her work also started or shaped important conversations around the future of the internet, in some cases even influencing tech policy (such as software patent reform).Prior to that, Sonal was responsible for content and community at Xerox PARC, where she briefly covered bitcoin in early 2011 and went deep on domains such as automation, bioinformatics, cleantech, flexible electronics, natural language, networking, optoelectronics, ubiquitous computing, and many more. Before moving back to California from NYC, Sonal was doing graduate work in developmental and cognitive psychology at Columbia University's school of education, and worked as a researcher "ethnographer" on NSF grants around teacher professional development and early numeracy. She studied English and Psychology at UCLA, where she also briefly worked with autistic children and later worked in classrooms. She loves reading, arts of all kinds, and traveling between worlds, and can be found on Twitter at @smc90.

Dr. Yanbing Li is a globally minded high tech executive with extensive leadership experience in the US and in China. She is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Storage and Availability Business Unit (SABU) at VMware and led the BU to become the fast growing business at VMware and a market leader in the past 3 years.

Yanbing holds a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University, a Master's degree from Cornell University, and a BS degree from Tsinghua University (Beijing), in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. She was inducted to the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame in 2018.

Joe is a leader, mentor and coach with over twenty years of experience at every level from engineering contributor to SVP of Engineering. Joe was a key early member of three startups that became successful public companies, and a fourth that was sold for $250M+. He currently coaches founders, CEOs and other leaders in tech to build great products, companies and cultures.

Cathy has served as our Chief Technology Officer since 2016. From 2014 to 2016, Cathy served as Senior Vice President and Vice President, Enterprise Search of Salesforce. From 2009 to 2014, Cathy served in engineering management roles of increasing responsibilities at Salesforce. Prior to joining Salesforce, Cathy served in various software development and software engineering management roles at Yahoo!, Oracle and Amazon. Cathy holds a B.A. with a special major in Computer Science from Swarthmore College.

Jerry Krikheli is the VP of Engineering at Houzz where he oversees all infrastructure, platform, and engineering across Consumer, Marketplace, and Industry Solutions initiatives. Prior to Houzz, Jerry was an engineering director at Google responsible for developing early versions of the display ad serving infrastructure and launching YouTube ads as well as video ads on mobile apps. He has a passion for building high-performing systems, products, and people.

Richard Wong is the Vice President of Engineering at Coursera. He oversees Coursera's infrastructure and product development. Prior to joining Coursera, Richard spent 4 years at LinkedIn where he joined LinkedIn, as a pre-IPO company. Richard was responsible for the LinkedIn's Jobs Marketplace in the early days and delivered product, and infrastructure that led to 10x revenue and user growth.

Richard was also responsible for the LinkedIn's international products, including successful entry of LinkedIn into China.Prior to LinkedIn, Richard spent over a decade at Microsoft leading various product and infrastructure development teams in the US and China. Richard received his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Erica Lockheimer has been at LinkedIn for over 8 years and most recently held the role of VP of Engineering heading the Growth Engineering team, where her focus was on increasing growth in new members and deepening engagement with members across LinkedIn's products.  She started the Growth Team from the ground up to now a high performing 120-person team. In January 2018 she moved on to her next play at LinkedIn and is now the head of Engineering for the LinkedIn Learning team, formerly known as Lynda.com.

She is also responsible for LinkedIn's Women In Tech (WIT) initiative that is focused on empowering women in technical roles within the company.  Prior to LinkedIn, she worked at Good Technology as Director of Server Engineering to securely manage and synchronize e-mail and calendar data between Exchange and mobile devices. She loves the challenge of starting with something nascent and carving out the right strategy, hiring the best people, and plotting a course to drive results. In 2014 and 2015, Erica was also voted amongst the top 22 women engineers in the world by Business Insider.  Erica is a San Francisco Bay Area native, has 2 kids, loves to run and is a graduate from San Jose State University with a B.S. in Computer Engineering.

Claire Lew is the CEO of Know Your Team – software that helps managers become better leaders. Her company, Know Your Team, has helped over 15,000 people in 25 countries at companies like Airbnb and Kickstarter. Know Your Team also runs a online leadership community called The Watercooler with 1,000 leaders and 2,000+ conversations on hiring, firing, business growth and more.

Claire’s mission in life is to help people become happier at work. She speaks internationally on how to avoid becoming a bad boss, and has been published in Harvard Business Review, CNBC, Inc, Fortune, among others. Claire is also an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at her alma mater, Northwestern University.