Cyara Leadership
Alok Kulkarni CEO, Chairman, Co-Founder
Alok founded Cyara with the vision that an easy-to-use CX Assurance platform could help enterprises be confident that they were delivering great customer experiences each and every time, even in a world with rapidly changing customer expectations and an ever increasingly complex technology ecosystem.
Prior to Cyara, he was Director, Solutions Engineering, at Genesys where he led the team that architected contact center solutions for the Asia Pacific market, driving Genesys to the top position in that market. He also held various engineering roles at National Australia Bank, NEC, Lincolne Scott, and Boral Building Technologies.
Alok has an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Technology from Melbourne Business School and a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering from Monash University, Australia. Alok is married with two boys and his passions include all things technology, travelling, spirituality, and playing golf.
Luan Tran CTO, Co-Founder
Luan is responsible for the development of the Cyara CX Assurance platform and related solutions. He is passionate about innovation, technology and getting a team together to create the impossible.
Prior to founding Cyara, Luan was with Genesys Professional Services for 8 years, working with all of its major clients in the Australia and New Zealand market. He was also in software product engineering for National Australia Bank, NEC, and IRESS.
Luan is married with two children and is a keen follower of Australian Rules Football, particularly when his Carlton Blues are playing.
James Isaacs President
James is responsible for all customer-facing, operational aspects of the company on a global basis including marketing, business development, sales and pre-sales, professional services, domain consulting, customer success, education and training, support, channels, and customer satisfaction. He is based out of Cyara’s Redwood City office in the heart of Silicon Valley.
James has 25+ years of leadership experience in building Enterprise software companies with a career background in operations, sales, product management, and business development. Starting his career at Apple, he later moved on to Concentric Network, a company he helped grow from $2M to $300M per year revenue run rate as both Product Management VP and Corporate Development VP, and which had a successful IPO and then a successful public company merger for $2.9 Billion. Following the acquisition of Concentric, James moved to Danger, Inc., a SaaS-based mobile platform for mobile operators, where he led the sales effort which grew revenue from $0 to $100M per year run rate before it was acquired by Microsoft in a $500M acquisition. James then joined 41st Parameter as the EVP Sales, Business Development, and Customer Operations, growing revenue at 40% per year before a successful sale to Experian for $325M. Prior to joining Cyara, he was the CEO of IoT security firm Mocana.
James has a BA in International Relations with an emphasis in Economics from Stanford University, and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in the Silicon Valley with his wife Page and has three children. When James isn’t at the office you will find him cycling the foothills around the San Francisco Bay area.
Jeremy Braidish Chief People Officer
Jeremy is responsible for all aspects of our human resources strategy, including compensation and benefits, talent acquisition, talent development, business partner activities as well as leading all human resources functions globally. As our Chief People Officer, Jeremy works to build an inclusive culture that attracts, retains and develops the best team of Cyarans to power our future.
Jeremy joined Cyara after four years as the Vice President, Human Resources, for Electronic Arts, the world’s largest video game development organization. While there, he oversaw the human resources strategy for 10,000 game makers across 30 global studio locations. He has also held leadership roles in Organizational Development & Learning, Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards and HR Business Partnership at companies such as Avaya, Honeywell, and Dell.
Jeremy currently lives with his wife and three daughters in Silicon Valley. In his free time, Jeremy enjoys golfing, fly fishing, discovering red wines and spending time with his family traveling, taking in their sports activities and watching “old” movies from the 80s and 90s.
Linda Chen Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer
Linda brings 25 years of general management and leadership experience across a variety of top-tier multinational branded companies and B2B enterprise SaaS companies. She has blended experience working as a cross-functional leader in both large and small organizations. Prior to joining Cyara, Linda was the EVP of Marketing and Strategy at Equilar, the leading executive compensation and governance solutions provider, where she led products, marketing, operations, pre-sales/sales, and client success. She was also VP/GM at Deem, Inc.
Linda also spent more than 10 years at Intuit, where she led go-to-market for the company’s Small Business mobile and SaaS solutions, QuickBooks, and Quicken. Earlier in her career, she drove global marketing for Crest toothbrushes at Procter & Gamble and graduated from the Technical Leadership Program at GE. She has a MBA from University of Michigan and a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering from University of California Berkeley.
Linda lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Bryan and their two daughters. In between driving to girls’ soccer tournaments, they enjoy helping out at local nonprofits (Friends for Youth & Sustainable San Mateo County) and exploring the California coastline.
Dennis Reno SVP Customer Experience
With 30+ years of experience discovering, designing, and delivering perfect customer journeys, Dennis Reno has turned his passion into his profession. At Cyara, Dennis serves as General, coaching and empowering our CX troops to provide the highest level of customer satisfaction and retention, and leads us on our path to go above and beyond industry standards, meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
With experience in areas like client engagement, technical support and training, and account management, and a resume that includes leadership roles at companies, such OneLogin Inc., Arxan Technologies, Oracle, and Microsoft, Dennis brings an impressive level of CX knowledge to Cyara.
In his free time, when he’s not working on historic home improvement projects or playing with his rescue dogs, Dennis can usually be found fundraising for nonprofit organizations and enjoying the San Francisco beaches and skyline.
Mark Verbeck CFO
Mark is an experienced strategic and operational CFO who has played a critical role in the growth of several successful companies, including Coupa Software, the leading SaaS spend management company, and Blade Network Technologies, a leader in high-speed Ethernet networking which was acquired by IBM. Mark’s prior experience also includes many years working as an equity research analyst, covering the enterprise and SaaS software industries, for firms such as Citibank and Cantor Fitzgerald.
Geoff Willshire Chief Innovation Officer
Geoff leads the formulation of strategies and new technologies to develop new capabilities, and works closely with the product management, marketing, and sales organizations. Geoff’s career has been focused on developing innovative new software products for the contact center market.
Geoff’s experience bridging mainstream software development and the highly tailored mission of professional services allows him to design and deliver creative and high-performing new products driven by dynamic market requirements.
Previously, Geoff was with Genesys for 13 years, where he held key development roles across the company and led the software development group in providing uniquely tailored solutions for customers adapting Genesys to their specific needs. He was also lead developer at HP in their telephony integration software business.
Geoff, his wife, and their daughter live in Brisbane and spend as much spare time as possible at their getaway on the beach in Queensland.
Max Lipovetsky VP of Product
Max is responsible for guiding Cyara through its next stage of product innovation, including the fast-evolving role of AI in testing.
With over 20 years’ experience driving product innovation in customer experience and customer engagement technology in the contact centre and IVR industries, Max Lipovetsky brings a wealth of knowledge to Cyara.
In 2003, he co-founded Global Speech Networks and brought to market one of the first SaaS contact centre clouds – capturing the attention of some of ANZ’s largest businesses. Next for Max was a role as CEO of CentraCX. This was a chance for him to focus on a passion area: the voice of the customer. At CentraCX he helped businesses use customer feedback as a growth tool to drive continual innovation.
Max, his wife, their three sons and Wolfgang the schnauzer, all live in Melbourne, Australia. When Max isn’t working, he enjoys cooking, cycling and video games.
Alok Kulkarni CEO, Chairman, Co-Founder
Alok founded Cyara with the vision that an easy-to-use CX Assurance platform could help enterprises be confident that they were delivering great customer experiences each and every time, even in a world with rapidly changing customer expectations and an ever increasingly complex technology ecosystem.
Prior to Cyara, he was Director, Solutions Engineering, at Genesys where he led the team that architected contact center solutions for the Asia Pacific market, driving Genesys to the top position in that market. He also held various engineering roles at National Australia Bank, NEC, Lincolne Scott, and Boral Building Technologies.
Alok has an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Technology from Melbourne Business School and a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering from Monash University, Australia. Alok is married with two boys and his passions include all things technology, travelling, spirituality, and playing golf.
Vikram “Vik” Verma
Vikram Verma has had a distinguished 30-year executive career with leading technology companies. He has been granted eight patents and honored with various accolades, including being named a Tau Beta Pi Williams Fellow and a “Technology Pioneer” by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Verma earned 3 degrees in electrical engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University. He has attended executive management programs at Harvard Business School, the University of California-Berkeley, and Stanford University.
Verma began his career at Savi Technology, Inc., a pioneer in the internet of things, eventually becoming its Chairman and CEO. After he led Savi’s acquisition by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), Verma served as the President of Strategic Venture Development for Lockheed Martin. After leaving Lockheed Martin, Verma was appointed as the CEO of Silicon Valley based cloud communications company 8×8, Inc. (NYSE: EGHT) and served in that role until December of 2020.
Verma has served on the board of RAE systems (acquired by Honeywell International (NYSE: HON)), Blackfire (acquired by ROKU, Inc (NASDAQ: ROKU)) and Ping Identity (NYSE: PING, acquired by Thoma Bravo). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Cambium Networks (NASDAQ: CMBM), Cyara, Zingtree, Genesis Digital, LLC and the Advisory Board of Wiliot. In addition he serves on the Board of Trustees of Florida Institute of Technology.