Management Team
David Young: CEO, Founder
David founded Joyent in 2004 to provide a comprehensive suite of internet-delivered software and on-demand infrastructure for small to medium organizations. Prior to Joyent, David worked at Moody’s Investor Service (1989-1999) in the Structured Finance, International, and Digital Media groups as General Manager and corporate Vice President and was co-founder and CTO of manageStar (2000-2004), an enterprise services management software company whose customers included TimeWarner, Sodexho, and Global Signal. David was the principal architect of manageStar’s Harmony platform for service delivery and managed a team of 80+ developers in San Francisco and Bangalore, India. David holds a BA in Classics (Greek), cum laude, from Indiana University. He lives in the joyent lifestyle in Marin County with his wife Maria and their two daughters.
Jason Hoffman: CTO, Founder
Jason A. Hoffman is a founder and the CTO of Joyent, an on-demand infrastructure and cloud computing company that serves billions of page views and traffics hundreds of millions of emails per month.
Joyent is dedicated to the singular mission that developers should be able to start at a small scale and flex to a global scale with minimal friction. Joyent is among the world’s largest OpenSolaris installations and while supporting all unix-based languages and data stores, Joyent’s products have included the first production support of Ruby on Rails, inclusion of the ZFS file system, and Joyent’s DTrace-enabled Ruby ships on MacOS X Leopard and soon on OpenSolaris.
Jason is a systems scientist with BS and MS degrees from UCLA, and a PhD from UCSD, and is an expert in scalable architectures. He has applied his knowledge and experience from the Web to Games to Computational Chemistry, Proteomics and Cancer biology.
Peter Watridge: CFO
Peter is a results oriented “numbers guy” who drives decisions and action based on accurate business metrics and market models. Peter started with Joyent in July 2005 and is now a member of the board and Joyent’s Chief Financial Officer.
Peter’s broad operating and management experience in finance, strategic marketing, product management, sales, and engineering has given him significant insight into organizational metrics and management structures. Peter has held senior management roles at Tellabs, Advanced Fibre Communications, HP, and American Power Conversion. Peter has an Engineering Physics degree from Cornell University and an MBA from UC Berkeley.
In his role as CFO and manager of the Joyent support and infrastructure team, Peter focuses on two main goals. The first goal is to ensure Joyent maintains a clear understanding of the internal business metrics and operations to enable continued investment and growth as the cloud market grows and matures. The second goal is to ensure that Joyent’s existing customers get a continuously improving support experience that enables them to grow their businesses on the Joyent cloud.
Mark Mayo: VP, Engineering
Mark is VP of Engineering at Joyent where he is responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of Joyent’s Cloud Computing technology. Mark’s experience in high performance computing and deep knowledge of enterprise IT drives the Joyent vision of helping customers do more with less and do it at enterprise level scale and reliability.
Prior to joining Joyent in early 2007, Mark spent 5 years as the Director of Grid Computing for Nobel Prize laureate Michael Smith’s Genome Sciences Center at the BC Cancer Agency, applying the upcoming field of bioinformatics and grid computing to Cancer research. The team made headlines in 2006 when they cracked the SARS genome in 6 days. Before his return to academia, Mark spent 8 years in the Internet and telecommunications sectors holding senior product architecture titles at Sprint, AT&T, and 360networks where he developed Internet platforms and products supporting billions of dollars of revenue. Mark hold bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Biology from the University of Guelph.
Brian Brown: COO
Brian Brown is Joyent’s COO. He helped David found and finance the company in 2004, remaining on the board since then, and rejoining the company full-time in 2009. Previously, he co-founded Sub-One, a clean energy technology company backed by General Electric and Chevron Technology Ventures. There, he wrote the business plan, co-raised the funding and served as Chief Strategy Officer. He set up and ran sales, marketing and business development, finding and closing a key $20 million strategic deal for the company. He also co-founded manageStar, an enterprise services software company, where he wrote the business plan and co-raised the funding. He served as president and chairman, but also set up and ran sales, marketing and business development. He has raised over $100 million for various companies.
Prior to startups, Brian served as a deputy editor with the Wall Street Journal in Europe, patented and sold a hardware device to a Fortune 200 company, and was a Vice President of Operations of a human rights organization (investigating abuses in Northern Iraq, Kashmir, East Timor, Cambodia and elsewhere). He has a B.A. from Vassar College, an M.Phil. from Cambridge University, J.D. from the McGeorge School of Law, and was a member of the New York and DC bars.
Chris Arisian: SVP, Sales
Chris Arisian leads Joyent’s worldwide commercial operations, where he is responsible for all sales, partner and business development activities. Chris focuses on insuring the reach of Joyent’s solutions into all areas of applicability for our on-demand infrastructure: from developers of social networks, gaming and ISV’s, up through large enterprises and public sector organizations.
Chris has held a variety of leadership roles in sales and alliances, including senior vice-president of sales at Exodus Communications, providing key infrastructure services to the largest online properties in both the dot.com and enterprise arenas. He helped create the Alliance Ecosystem program, which successfully created a monetized marketplace for business exchange within Exodus’ partner and customer community.
Prior to Exodus, Chris spent nine years at various sales and management roles at Oracle Corporation, where he last held the position of vice-president of Service Sales. He participated in scaling the division ten-fold and was a key architect in the creation of new service offerings and customized implementations to the customer base, including some of the world’s largest companies such as Boeing, AT&T. Chris holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
James Duncan: VP, Product Development
James is a grizzled veteran of many startups – some successful, some not. James brings perspective of how companies change, from small to large, and what a company needs to do at each stage of its growth. Most recently, James was one of two founders at Reasonably Smart, a Platform-as-a-Service company based in Montreal. Joyent’s acquisition of Reasonably Smart’s subsequent in January 2009 had James become the VP Product Development.
Prior to Reasonably Smart, James spent 7 years at Fotango, finishing his time there as the CIO. Fotango, acquired by Canon in 2001, developed one of the world’s first Platform-as-a-Service offerings. This expertise allows James to bring a deep knowledge of platforms, frameworks, and operations to Joyent and their customers.
