15 movers and shakers driving a new breed of startups in the enterprise tech IPO rush

Eliot Horowitz, CTO and Co-Founder of MongoDB

Eliot Horowitz is one of the founders of MongoDB, along with Kevin P. Ryan and Dwight Merriman.

MongoDB, an open-source database company based in New York, went public in October 2017. MongoDB had raised $256 million before going public with a valuation of $1.6 billion. Since then, the company's market cap has swelled to $3.6 billion under Ittycheria. Today, MongoDB has over 30 million downloads and over 1,000 technology and service partners.

Starting in 2007, Horowitz wrote the core codebase for the popular open-source database today. Today, as CTO he oversees the engineering and product teams. Recently, he led MongoDB in introducing new licensing to prevent major cloud companies from selling its software without open-sourcing it.

Before MongoDB, Horowitz also co-founded an online retail search engine called ShopWiki, which he built and later sold in 2010. Horowitz had also worked as a software developer in DoubleClick.

In 2006, Horowitz was listed in BusinessWeek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under Age 25, and in 2015, he was listed in Business Insider’s “Under 35 and Crushing It” list. Just last year, he was also named to Crain's NY Business 40 Under 40 Class list.

Sameer Dholakia, CEO of SendGrid

Sameer Dholakia is accustomed to using both hands to accomplish a variety of jobs — and not just because he's ambidextrous.

The India-born executive has served in numerous roles in the tech industry, from sales to product management.

Since Dholakia took the helm as SendGrid’s CEO in 2014, the company's revenue has quadrupled, and he led the company to IPO on Nov. 15, 2017. Twilio announced it would acquire SendGrid in a $2 billion deal.

Dholakia, who has ten siblings and grew up in a two-room flat in India, has previously served as CEO at VMLogix, which was acquired by Citrix. And he worked in sales, business development and product management for Trilogy, where he helped the startup grow to a $300 million business.

And his ambidexterity has given him another special skill: he can write with his left hand and throw a fastball with his right.

Lynne Laube, COO and Co-Founder of Cardlytics

Lynne Laube is one of the co-founders of Cardlytics, along with Scott Grimes and Hans Theisen. On Feb. 8, Laube took Cardlytics public, and since 2008, she has secured over $200 million in capital from investors. At the time, this Atlanta-based company had a valuation of $273 million.

Cardlytics partners with more than 1,500 financial institutions to run banking rewards programs for customers. It also uses insights on how consumers spend money to help marketers target likely buyers and measure the impact of marketing campaigns.

Laube wanted to build a company where people love coming to work everyday. For example, Cardlytics encourages and funds employees to start their own extracurricular groups, such as the rock band The Redeemers, a beer brewing club and a mentorship organization

In 2016, she was named one of the top 10 venture-backed female founders by Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur 360. She has also been a finalist for the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award twice.

Within Cardlytics, she launched Women of Cardlytics to provide career mentorship and support for women. Before founding Cardlytics, she worked at Capital One and Bank One.

Outside of work, Laube loves to cook, and she swears by her on-demand workouts.

Drew Houston, CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox

Drew Houston co-founded Dropbox in 2007 along with Arash Ferdowsi. He leads the direction and product strategy of Dropbox.

Dropbox allows users to securely share and store files, as well as collaborate on them. Based in San Francisco, Dropbox has 500 million users registered worldwide and can work on both mobile and desktop devices. It went public on March 23 with a valuation of $9.2 billion at the time. It had raised $756 million.

Houston's first company was an SAT prep company he started in college. After he graduated, he wanted to get this company into a startup accelerator, but it got rejected. Fortunately, he founded Dropbox two years later. He came up with the idea while riding a bus from Boston to New York, when he realized he left a thumb drive with files he needed at home. He was eventually able to enter Dropbox into Y Combinator along with cofounder Arash Ferdowsi.

Houston was recently named to Forbes' 400 list. Outside of work, he is a huge Pearl Jam fan and he plays guitar in a 90's rock/alternative cover band called Angry Flannel.

Tien Tzuo, CEO and Founder of Zuora

Tien Tzuo founded Zuora in 2007, leading the shift to subscription based business models and coining the phrase Subscription Economy. Zuora's cloud-based software helps companies launch, manage and transform into subscription businesses. Based in San Mateo, California, this Software as a Service platform automates the business operations for subscriptions.

Tzuo even wrote a book about the subscription model called "SUBSCRIBED: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It."

Zuora went public on April 12 with a valuation of $1.4 billion at the time. It had raised $154 million.

Tzuo grew up in an immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York, and spent a lot of his time playing stickball. Both his parents started their own business, which encouraged him to become an entrepreneur as well. His first job ever was scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins in lower Manhattan when he was 16.

Later on, Tzuo would become the 11th employee at Salesforce and worked there for nine years, building the billing system and serving in executive roles in technology, marketing and strategy. At Salesforce, he also built out the product management & marketing organization and served as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer.

Tzuo was named Entrepreneur of the Year by EY in 2016. While he was at Salesforce, he was a CMO of the Year finalist by the CMO Council and BusinessWeek Magazine. He is also on the Board of Directors for Network for Good.

Kirsten Wolberg, Chief Technology and Operations Officer of DocuSign

Kirsten Wolberg is the Chief Technology and Operations Officer at DocuSign, which went public on April 27 with a valuation of $4.5 billion at the time

Wolberg grew up in Alaska playing basketball and ice hockey. Before DocuSign, she previously worked at PayPal and had served as Vice President of Technology and Separation Executive. She also headed Salesforce.com IT as Chief Information Officer and has served in several technology, product and operations roles at companies like Charles Schwab, InnoVentry, and CSC Index.

DocuSign lets businesses, enterprises and individuals collect information and sign documents online. Businesses can manage business transactions such as digital signature, collaboration, workflow automation and storage, identity management, authentication, and data collection.

Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet

A former college football player who played for Dartmouth, Mark Mader now leads a team of 800 employees as CEO of Smartsheet, a popular online spreadsheet app that went public in April with a $1 billion valuation.

Smartsheet, which is based in Bellevue, Washington, develops online spreadsheets for enterprises. Users can plan, track, automate, and report on their work, all on the cloud. Smartsheet also integrates applications from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Atlassian and more.

The company has more than 74,000 customers and was named Washington’s Best Workplace by the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Before Smartsheet, Mader was senior vice president of global services for Onyx Software, where he led the consulting and customer-facing teams worldwide. A dual-citizen of Germany and the U.S., Mader spends time between both countries.

Aaron Skonnard, CEO and Co-Founder of Pluralsight

Aaron Skonnard taught himself how to code at age 10 when his father brought home one of the first Apple 2 computers. Eventually, Skonnard would study computer science at Brigham Young University and eventually launch Pluralsight in 2004 along with cofounders Fritz Onion, Keith Sparkjoy and Bill Williams.

Based in Utah, Pluralsight is a technology learning platform targeted at software developers, IT administrators and creative professionals. The company offers more than 3,000 career development and business training courses, and went public with a $2 billion valuation in May.

Skonnard focuses on business strategy, future direction, product development and strategic partnerships at the company. And when he's not working, he's running, swimming or making his "world-famous Skonnard protein shake", developed by him and his wife: chocolate Costco Orgain powder, half a banana, a third cup of egg whites and a half-cup of ice.

Josh James, CEO and Founder of Domo

In 2010, Josh James founded Domo, which is based in Utah. Before that, he was the co-founder and CEO of Omniture, where he facilitated Omniture’s $1.8 billion sale to Adobe in 2009.

Domo's cloud-based platform connects the CEO of a company to employees with data and insights on the business. It allows leaders to manage the business from their smartphones. When Domo went public on June 28, it was under scrutiny because of red flags in its company filings. At IPO, Domo was valued at $511 million and had raised $193 million.

As a child, James had some roles as an actor, including in a Kellogg’s Honey Smacks commercial. Outside of work, James had founded a CEO and founder resource called CEO.com. He also founded Silicon Slopes, a non-profit to promote the interests of Utah’s high-tech industry.

Amit Yoran, CEO of Tenable

As Chairman and CEO, Amit Yoran leads Tenable, a Maryland-based company that helps organizations reduce cybersecurity risks. Tenable sells security technology that continuously monitors for vulnerabilities and prioritizes threats to reduce loss. Tenable has over 1 million users and more than 21,000 customers worldwide. It went public on July 26 and was valued at $2.1 billion.

Previously, Yoran was president of RSA, and prior to that, he was the founder and CEO of NetWitness, which got acquired by RSA. He currently serves as a board member and adviser to several security startups.

Yoran previously attended West Point and served in the military. Yoran also has experience working in the government, as he has served as the founding director of the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) program in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He had also previously founded Riptech, a security service provider that was acquired by Symantec in 2002.

A Harley Davidson-riding adrenaline junkie and avid snowboarder, Yoran has had only one catastrophic off trail wipeout that required surgery, so far.

Julia Hartz, CEO and Co-Founder of Eventbrite

Julia Hartz leads the vision, strategy and growth of Eventbrite, which went public in September with a $1.8 billion valuation.

She founded Eventbrite in 2006 along with her husband Kevin Hartz and Renaud Visage. Eventbrite lets users find, create and plan events, such as classes, workshops, conferences, concerts, fundraisers, performances and more. Users can also sell tickets, register for events, and manage events online.

Growing up, Hartz was a ballerina. And prior to Eventbrite, Hartz had a career in television. Her first gig in her television career was on the set of the hit show, Friends. Hartz has also worked at MTV, where she was on the development team for Jackass, and then she worked at FX Networks. There, she oversaw shows like The Shield, Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck and 30 Days.

Under Hartz's leadership, Eventbrite was named in Fortune's 100 Best Workplaces in the U.S., Glassdoor's Employees' Choice Best Places to Work, and San Francisco Business Times' Best Places to Work in the SF bay area list. Hartz was also named one of Fortune’s 2015 40 Under 40 business leaders, Inc.’s 35 Under 35 in 2014, and Fortune’s Most Powerful Women.

Robin Ducot, CTO of SurveyMonkey

Robin Ducot joined SurveyMonkey just last year in October. She leads the company’s engineering team and works with the product, design, and data teams. Before that, Ducot had been the Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at DocuSign and the Vice President of Engineering at Eventbrite.

SurveyMonkey helps people easily create online surveys, as well as measure the results gathered from the surveys. It can also gather market insights. SurveyMonkey, based in San Mateo, California, went public on Sept. 26 with a valuation of $1.5 billion at the time.

SVMK, the parent company of SurveyMonkey that tennis star Serena Williams serves as a director of, also recently filed for IPO.

Outside of engineering, Ducot has spent a decade playing music in a variety of indie and punk bands. She has also designed costumes for theater companies.

Shay Banon, CEO and Co-Founder of Elastic

Shay Banon decided to study computer science by counting the number of jobs in the weekend newspaper. Now, he's the CEO of Elastic, a company that develops open source tools that help with search, logging, metrics and data security.

The Mountain View, California-based company went public in early October with a valuation of $2.5 billion.

Banon founded Elastic in 2012 along with Simon Willnauer, Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness. He first became interested in search in 2004 when he tried to build a recipe app for his wife, who was studying to be a Chef in the Cordon Bleu. Eventually, he would build Elasticsearch in 2009, Elastic’s open-source search engine.

Some of Elastic's most well known tools include Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash, X-Pack and Elastic Cloud.

Frank Calderoni, CEO of Anaplan

Frank Calderoni went straight to IBM after college and spent the next 21 years there.

But that was just the beginning of a career in tech that saw him serve in executive positions at Cisco, QLogic Corporation, SanDisk Corporation, and as CFO at Red Hat (which IBM recently announced it would acquire).

Calderoni joined Anaplan in May 2017, steering the company through its IPO five months later. The San Francisco based company, which sells a cloud platform to help businesses make better-informed plans and decisions faster, raised more than $250 million in its offering and now has a market cap of $2.8 billion.

Kevin B. Thompson, CEO of SolarWinds

Kevin Thompson was promoted to president and CEO of SolarWinds in March 2010. Before that, he was Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer.

SolarWinds offers products and tools for IT management. These tools offer solutions for issues related to networks, servers, applications, storage, virtualization, cloud, or development operations. The Austin-based company went public in October with a valuation of $4.6 billion.

Prior to joining SolarWinds, Thompson was Chief Financial Officer of Surgient, Inc. He had also previously worked Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at business intelligence software company SAS Institute, as well as as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Red Hat, which IBM recently announced it would acquire.