John brings to Lightspeed more than 35 years of chief executive and senior operations experience working with leading technology companies, including the Vantive Corporation, Oracle Corporation and Tymshare, Inc. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Apptera, Nufern and StarAnalytics and served as an advisor to Virsa Systems.
Most recently, John was CEO of the Vantive Corporation, a leading customer relationship management (CRM) software provider. Joining in 1993, he took the company from $0.5M to more than $160M, including several rounds of financing and an IPO in 1995. During that time, he helped establish the company as a market leader and significantly shaped the CRM industry with technical innovation and groundbreaking new business practices. In 1998, he received Call Center Magazine's prestigious Call Center Pioneer Award, which honors individual contributions to the development of the call center industry. He created a strategic partnership between Vantive and PeopleSoft that led to the company's acquisition by PeopleSoft in 1999 for over $500M.
Previously, John was Senior Vice President at Oracle Corporation and was the company's 26th employee. From 1982-1990, he created and grew Oracle's International Division to 92 countries, 3,400 employees and over $400M, representing about 50% of total revenues. He also worked as a senior consultant for Merrill, Pickard, Anderson and Eyre, a venture capital firm. John started his business career at Tymshare, Inc., where he worked for seven years in various international management positions. Prior to that, he started the academic computing center at a unit of the City University of New York.
John served on the Board of Directors of Samaritan House in San Mateo from 1991-1995 and since then has been a Director Emeritus. In 2001, he became a technology advisor to the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. From 2001 to 2007, he was a member of the Board of Directors of Planned Parenthood, Golden Gate. Since 2005, he has been a member of the Board of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
John holds a bachelor's degree in East Asian History from the City University of New York. He has done graduate work in History at Princeton University, in Statistics at Bernard Baruch School of Business, and is currently a graduate student in Physics at San Francisco State University.