Team

THE PISTON CLOUD TEAM

Piston Cloud was founded in early 2011 and is headquartered in the financial district of San Francisco. We love shuffling, libations from Alembic and Magnolia, coffee from Blue Bottle, and dressing fancy on Fridays. We also love little kittens.

EXECUTIVE TEAM

  • Joshua McKenty

    Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer Prior to co-founding Piston Cloud Computing, Joshua McKenty was the Technical Architect of NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Platform and the OpenStack compute components. As a member of OpenStack's Project Policy Board, Joshua plays an instrumental role in the OpenStack community. Joshua has over two decades of experience in entrepreneurship, management and software engineering and architecture. He was the team lead for the development of the Netscape Browser (vs. 8) as well as AOL's IE AIM toolbar, and a senior engineer at Flock.com. He also led the successful first release of OpenQuake, an open source software application allowing users to compute seismic hazard, seismic risk and the socio-economic impact of earthquakes. In his spare time, Joshua has crafted a handmade violin and banjo, fathered two children, and invented his own juggling trick, the McKenty Madness.

  • Christopher MacGown

    Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer Prior to co-founding Piston Cloud Computing, Christopher was an early employee of Slicehost before its acquisition by Rackspace in 2008. From there he became a team lead in the development of Cloud Servers Windows. Christopher is an originating member of OpenStack's Nova-core development team. Recent projects include serving as senior engineer on the Global Earthquake Model project, driving the development of a highly scalable earthquake modeling engine. In his spare time Christopher enjoys playing the ukulele, drawing and reading 16th and 17th century philosophy.

  • Gretchen Curtis

    Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer Gretchen has been working with tech companies and start-ups in the Bay area for over a decade. Prior to co-founding Piston, she led PR and communications for the Chief Technology Officer for IT at NASA, and was the Communications Manager for NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing project. Before her work at NASA, she ran business operations at Flock, Inc., the social web browser, and staffed technical teams at companies such as AOL, Fujitsu and TechTV through her role at TechLink Systems. At Piston Cloud, Gretchen leads Marketing, PR and Communications, and oversees the company's business operations. In her spare time, Gretchen dabbles in many creative pursuits, including photography, writing, film, painting, fashion and graphic design. WARNING: Approach with caution! Though she appears harmless, if you leave the toilet seat up, she will end you.

  • Paul Lappas

    Director, Products While most people are counting sheep, Paul dreams about how to simplify the delivery of complex internet infrastructure services. He has been known to call customers in the middle of the night to better understand their requirements. At times, he has been accused of bringing too many donuts into the office. Paul has a decade of experience delivering internet infrastructure services. Most recently, he was co-founder and VP Engineering of GoGrid, #3 public cloud in the US, where he was responsible for engineering and operations, having developed the initial proof-of-concept of the service and bootstrapped its growth to profitability in less than two years. GoGrid is a venture of ServePath, a managed hosting company, where Paul ran engineering and operations. He has also been a senior Engineer at portal software pioneer Epicentric and an application engineer for Motorola's Iridium satellite phone network.

  • Lloyd Dewolf

    Director of Customer Care Prior to joining Piston Cloud Computing, Lloyd spent five years as the Operational Lead of WordPress.com VIP Services from its inception through it becoming and staying among Automattic's top three revenue streams. Lloyd's expertise on software usability and his ability to find software defects was sought out across Automattic's product teams. Starting in 2000, he spent four years at the IBM Toronto Lab as a member of IBM DB2 Advanced Support on a special High Availability and Down Systems team, followed by joining the Netscape Browser 8 team and a year at Flock, Inc., the social web browser. Specializing in Enterprise Customer Support and Open Source Quality Assurance, Lloyd is an active member of the WordPress and Mozilla Firefox communities. Lloyd's young children have trained him to wake up at 6am, something that his right coast customers appreciate, and his programmer colleagues might never.

ENGINEERING TEAM

  • Ben "Grue" McGraw

    Senior Software Engineer Ben McGraw (aka "Grue") is an alumnus of IMVU and ApartmentRatings, and has an addiction to automated tests and build systems. As a hobbyist, he has spent over half of his life working on various open source game creation engines. Ben likes to engage in any recreational and/or social activity that doesn’t involve direct exposure to sunlight. He is, in fact, dating.

  • Nick Bartos

    DevOps Lead Nick Bartos, aka Captain Nebraska, worked as a Sr. Systems Administrator in NASA's Intelligent Systems Division before being lured away by Joshua McKenty and his promise of working on something cooler than putting s%&t into space. He specializes in securing infrastructure and Linux systems internals, and migrating legacy systems into modern architecture. He is the brilliant mind behind — and — (sorry, he can't tell you or he'd have to kill you).

  • Mike Lundy

    Engineering Lead Mike Lundy is an Engineering Lead at Piston. He enjoys fine APIs and long walks through low-level code. Before joining Piston Cloud, Mike worked on distributed image processing systems at NASA Ames Research Center; you may have seen his work in Google Earth and Microsoft's World Wide Telescope. In his spare time, Mike likes to bike, hike, take photos, and mock Emacs users.

  • Mandell Degerness

    Senior Systems Analyst Ditching the heady and dangerous life of a consultant, Mandell joined Piston Cloud after 20 years of working in technology. He is an expert in large data storage devices and disaster recovery planning. Prior to joining Piston Cloud, Mandell was responsible for planning and managing infrastructure systems for the British Columbia Provincial Government. When not planning for the data-apocalypse, Mandell can be found juggling and riding a unicycle. Occasionally these activities occur at the same time, though usually without the chainsaws.

  • Chris Fattarsi

    Distributed Everything Engineer Before joining Piston Cloud, Chris was gallivanting around the world through South America, Europe and Asia while working on various freelance web projects. His past life before that was at NASA, where his skills in code design and architecture were proven useful in securing NASA's applications from the all the nasties in the world. He was the technical lead for NASA's first public facing social site for data miners focusing on scalability while leading an unruly team of web developers and designers. In his spare time Chris likes to think of ways to automate all the mundane things in life (like brushing teeth or driving - ideally using some sort of web application). He also rock climbs, rescues cats, and eats pizza, and his favorite color is #FF69B4.

  • Josh Kearney

    Principal OpenStack Engineer Josh Kearney lives and works in beautiful Hazel Green, Wisconsin. An early computer hobbyist on the development side, his first job was with a local newspaper, the Telegraph Herald. A few years later, Silicon Valley came calling and he moved to Sunnyvale for a job with Blue Coat, a web security firm. He moved back to Hazel Green for a network admin position with an electric company before getting snatched up by Slicehost. One week later, Rackspace purchased Slicehost where he was later put on the OpenStack Nova development team. When not producing perfect pieces of Python for Piston, you can find Josh sipping a glass of Maker’s Mark with his beautiful wife.

SALES & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT TEAM

  • James Dalton

    Director of Sales James is a seasoned sales manager with a strong background in security. Most recently, James served as a Senior Strategic Partner Account Manager at Symantec, where he earned top sales performance awards for the last three consecutive years. He has also held sales positions at Voltage Security and Verisign. At Piston Cloud, James is focused on driving revenue, speeding growth, increasing brand awareness, boosting market share, building strong relationships, and maximizing potential opportunities.

  • John Spencer

    Business Development John is an industry veteran with over 25 years experience in Software Sales, Channel Development and Technology Licensing. Prior to joining Piston Cloud, he served in a variety of Channel Development and technology licensing roles at Actional Corporation, a leader in the web services, EAI and SOA Management space. Prior to Actional, John served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Teknowledge, Inc., an artificial intelligence company located in Palo Alto. John started his career with The Boeing Company and Boeing Computer Services. He holds a BS in Mathematics from Northwest Missouri University and an MBA from Seattle University.

MARKETING TEAM

  • Eric Frank

    Design Lead A Bay Area native, Eric designed his way through the mean streets of Los Angeles for eight years before joining the Piston Cloud team in 2011. Most recently, he was the Web and Marketing Designer for a national shipping case company, and the Media Specialist for the indie-classic clothing company Teenage Millionaire. When not designing for the eye, Eric spends his time designing for the ear, scoring commercials, playing guitar in rap videos, rapping in rap videos, and strumming his 70-year-old ukulele. Tweet him @MrEricFrank.

  • Karen McIntyre

    Marketing Analyst A fourth generation San Franciscan, Karen is kind of a big deal around these parts. After receiving her BS in Nursing from the University of San Francisco and briefly pursuing a law degree, she came on board at Piston Cloud. When she’s not showing off her mad frosting skills on the pro cupcake circuit, she can be found at Piston Cloud HQ, where she assists with marketing and office operations.