Executive Officers

John Hering, 43
Chief Executive Officer and Director

Mr. Hering is also a founding Partner at Vy Capital, where he has been a Partner since 2015. Mr. Hering has spent his entire career as a technology founder, entrepreneur, and investor. He co-founded Lookout, a leading global cybersecurity company, in 2007. Lookout protects over 175 million devices globally and works with many of the largest organizations in the world including the US Department of Defense and the New Zealand Defense Force. Lookout is backed by over $350 million in venture capital from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Blackrock, T. Rowe Price, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Qualcomm. Mr. Hering served as the company’s Chief Executive Officer until March 2014, and he currently serves as a Co-Founder and Executive Director. Mr. Hering also co-founded Coalition, a leading global cybersecurity insurance company, in 2017 and currently serves as a Co-Founder and a member of the board of directors. Partnered with leading global insurer Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, Coalition is the leading provider of cyber insurance and security, combining comprehensive insurance and proactive cybersecurity tools to help businesses manage and mitigate cyber risk. Coalition is backed by over $100 million in venture capital from leading investors including Hillhouse Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Vy Capital. Mr. Hering has served on the board of directors of HackerOne since 2014 and the board of directors of Redacted, Inc., where he is also a Co-Founder, since 2015.

Katja Lake, 43
Chief Financial Officer

Mrs. Lake is the Chief Financial Officer and the Head of Investor Relations at Vy Capital, and currently sits on the board of Vy Capital Holding Company, the sole member of our sponsor. Prior to joining Vy Capital in 2015, Mrs. Lake was previously a Vice President at Deutsche Bank from 1995 to 2015. During her tenure at Deutsche Bank, she held various senior fund structuring roles for private bank, international wealth management and institutional clients. Ms. Lake holds a graduate degree in Business Administration from Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

Daniel Schwarz, 46
Chief Operating Officer

Mr. Schwarz is the Chief Operating Officer and Director of Vy Capital since 2013, and currently sits on the board of Vy Capital Holding Company, the sole member of our sponsor. Prior to Vy Capital, Mr. Schwarz was a Director and investment advisor at UBS from 2006 to 2013 and served as the Head of Asset Management and member of the Asset Allocation Committee for a multi-billion private client bank from 1998 to 2006. Mr. Schwarz started his career at Goldman Sachs, where he traded and executed cross-asset class orders for Goldman Sachs Private Bank Zurich from 1996 to 1998. Mr. Schwarz holds graduate degrees from Kaderschule Zurich in Business Administration and Certified European Financial Analyst and Financial Asset Manager from AZEK, respectively.

Board of Directors

Alexander Tamas
Chairman of the Board

Mr. Tamas, a German citizen, worked in the technology mergers and acquisitions group at Goldman Sachs in London from 2006 to 2008 before joining DST as Partner in 2008. At DST, he personally led and sourced some of the most important technology investments of that time, including leading early primary investments in Facebook, Airbnb, Spotify, Twitter, JD.com, Alibaba, Xiaomi and Zalando. He also helped to consolidate the Russian Internet sector around Mail.ru as its Managing Director and took the company public in 2010. After leaving DST in 2013, Mr. Tamas founded Vy Capital with a vision of building a technology investment venture capital firm designed to invest in some of the world’s leading companies and own them for decades. Mr. Tamas has been a Partner at Vy Capital since founding the firm in 2013. Mr. Tamas is also the founder of numerous companies and initiatives, such as the venture-backed data science company, Synaptic, the Alexander Tamas Fellowship at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, a neuroscience research institute at Imperial College, and, together with Mr. Hering, Mr. Tamas helped to form a biosafety initiative in partnership with UCSF and CZ BioHub.

Hugo Barra, 43
Director

Mr. Barra has been the Vice President of Virtual Reality at Facebook, heading the Oculus VR team, since 2017. Prior to Facebook, Mr. Barra was Vice President of Xiaomi’s Global division responsible for the company’s products and operations in all markets outside of Mainland China from 2013 to 2017. Mr. Barra led the company’s entry into 20 countries including India, Indonesia, Russia and Spain, which contributed materially to the company’s $54 billion IPO in Hong Kong in 2018. Before Xiaomi, Mr. Barra spent 6 years at Google from 2008 to 2013, where he served as Vice President of Android Product Management, overseeing global development of the Android operating system from its early days to the first billion users worldwide. During his college years, he interned for several years at the MIT Media Lab, and spun off speech recognition startup LOBBY7 (sold to Nuance Communications) that eventually powered the first generation of Apple’s Siri voice assistant. Mr. Barra received a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a bachelor’s degree in management science from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Julie Herendeen, 54
Director

Ms. Herendeen has over 25 years of experience launching and scaling enduring technology brands, managing global businesses and building high performance marketing and product teams. Since 2019 Ms. Herendeen has been the chief marketing officer of PagerDuty, a pioneer in Digital Operations Management, where she helped lead the company’s transition to the public markets. Ms. Herendeen has served as a director on the board of HubSpot since 2016 and also served as an advisory board member at PagerDuty from 2017 to 2019, prior to joining as Chief Marketing Officer. Prior to PagerDuty, Ms. Herendeen served as head of global enterprise marketing at Uber from 2017 to 2018 and vice president of marketing at Dropbox from 2014 to 2016, building the company’s first global marketing team. Prior to Dropbox, Ms. Herendeen was the chief marketing officer of Lookout from 2010 to 2014. Earlier in her career, she spent five years at Yahoo from 2003 to 2008 as vice president and held various positions at Shutterfly, Netscape and Apple. Ms. Herendeen holds a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Steve Huffman, 36
Director

Mr. Huffman is the Co-Founder, Director and CEO of Reddit, the “front page of the internet” and the sixth most visited site in the U.S. Founded in 2005 Reddit is a platform of over 35,000 online communities that is home to 430 million monthly visitors and over 50 million daily users. From 2010 to 2015, Mr. Huffman was also the Co-Founder, CTO and Director of the online travel company Hipmunk, which was acquired by SAP Concur in 2016. Mr. Huffman has served on the board of directors of the cyber security firm Bishop Fox since 2019 as well as the Tech Advisory Board for the Anti-Defamation League since 2018. He has also served as a mentor at Hackbright Academy, a San Francisco-based coding school for women, since 2016. Mr. Huffman holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

Sujay Jaswa, 40
Director

Since 2016 Mr. Jaswa has been the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of WndrCo, a technology holding company, where he serves as Chairman of Aura, Twingate, and VPN Super. Mr. Jaswa led investments in 1Password and The Infatuation/Zagat. Previously, Mr. Jaswa was the Business Founder, Chief Financial Officer, and Vice President of Business at Dropbox, where he created and led the company’s global business and finance organizations. During his tenure from 2010 to 2015, Dropbox grew from an early stage startup into a leading global technology company. Earlier in his career, Mr. Jaswa was a Principal at New Enterprise Associates from 2008 to 2010, where he was involved in early investments in Workday, Cloudflare, and Playdom. He was also an early individual investor in Guardant Health and Skillz. Mr. Jaswa is a Lecturer on startups at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and sponsors research awards at Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry, UCSF’s Cancer Center, and Harvard Business School. Mr. Jaswa holds a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Justin Kan, 37
Director

Mr. Kan is a global technology entrepreneur and investor. Mr. Kan is best known as the co-founder of Twitch, the internet live video streaming platform which was founded in 2006 and acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. Twitch is now one of the most trafficked sites on the internet with 700+ billion minutes watched in 2020 and 6 million monthly broadcasters. From 2015 to 2016, Mr. Kan was a Partner at Y-Combinator, the world’s leading seed investment company and start-up accelerator which has helped launch over 2,000 technology start-ups including Stripe, AirBnB, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, PagerDuty, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit. The Y-Combinator community now has over 4,000 founders and the combined valuation of YC companies is now in excess of $150 billion. From 2017 to 2020, Mr. Kan was the Chief Executive Officer of Legal Technology Services Inc. Mr. Kan has served as a Partner at Goat Capital since 2020 and as a Director at ScriptDash Inc. (dba Alto Pharmacy) since 2015, Flirtey Inc. since 2018, Long Game Inc. since 2020, Bird Rides Inc. (dba Bird) since 2017, ZeroCater Inc. since 2017 and Scotty Inc. since 2017. Mr. Kan has co-founded six technology start-ups which have collectively raised over $500 million in venture capital and has personally invested in many of the fastest growing technology startups globally, including Reddit and Cruise Automation, which was acquired by General Motors for $1 billion. Mr. Kan holds a B.A. in Physics and Philosophy from Yale University.

Javier Olivan, 43
Director

Mr. Olivan is the Vice President of Central Products at Facebook. Mr. Olivan joined Facebook as the Head of International Growth in 2007. At the time, Facebook had fewer than 50 million people using the service with a very small portion coming from users outside the US. Over the last 12 years, Mr. Olivan helped grow the company to a community of over two billion people with more than 87% of those people accessing Facebook from outside the US. Mr. Olivan presently oversees Facebook’s growth efforts, content enforcement efforts, ads and business platform, commerce, payments and social impact efforts. Beyond his product teams, he also leads several other groups including Facebook’s teams for data science, internationalization, UX research and content strategy. Prior to joining Facebook, Mr. Olivan worked at Siemens Mobile from 2002 to 2005 and earlier in his career, worked for NTT in Japan from 2001 to 2002. He previously served as an independent board director for MercadoLibre from 2012 to 2019 and has served as a director for Endeavor Global since February 2020. Mr. Olivan holds a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University and a master’s degree in both electrical and industrial engineering from Universidad de Navarra in Spain.