Sammy Kariuki

Kua Zone

Kua Zone LLC, USA is aimed at empowering the children and young adults of this global village with technological & entrepreneurial skills and networks to in future co-create innovative solutions and products for the global market.

Co-Founder

Kua Zone is a global technology and innovation hub,  incubating the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. 

Our mission is to develop a community of motivated, talented and capable young minds and innovators - eager to solve local and global challenges and make the world a better place.

Founders Connect

Co-Founded the global community “Founders Sunday” which in December 2023 rebranded to Founders Connect. 

It serves as a non-profit educational platform and support for founders in all continents of the world (1700 + start-ups/scale-ups) 

The community meets up every Friday 8 am EST/ 13.00 GMT on Zoom for lively discussions related to the founders' journey (#founderscoffee☕️)

For founders - by founders!

Tymax Agribusiness Solutions Ltd

Tymax is an agribusiness consultancy company that deals in studies (baseline, value chain analysis & business feasibility), markets analysis and market development services; enterprise development and business re-engineering. 

We support actors along the agriculture value chains through upgrading of strategies aiming at increased effectiveness and efficiency that contribute to improved food security, increased incomes and wealth creation.  

The main thrust is supporting empowerment of the value chain actors to build profitable and sustainable enterprises and boost efficiency and effectiveness in market processes.

Founder

Everest Enterprises Ltd

Everest is a horticultural exporting company with diverse markets in Europe.

General Manager

Operations Manager

Assistant Management Accountant

Worked at the company before joining campus and during holidays. Through this time managed to work in various departments: Marketing,  Human resources & Administration, Finance, Operations, and Farms.

Management Trainee

Co-Founder @ Kua Zone | Developing next generation innovators and entrepreneurs

👋 Hi, I’m Sammy Kariuki — Co-Founder, Kua Zone.

We are committed to creating a new wave of innovators, problem-solvers, and change-makers, by empowering the next generation with the technological and entrepreneurial mindsets and skills, and global networks they need to thrive.

Additionally, I have provided consulting services to renowned international organizations such as the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Conservation International (CI), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Netherlands Development Organization (SNV), and the African Wildlife Foundation [AWF]) engaged in research, the promotion of climate-smart technologies, financial inclusion, and the development of businesses and markets. Both personally and in my role as the founder of Tymax Agribusiness Solutions Limited. Climate change adaptation and mitigation projects are ongoing. 

Connect/Follow + Hit the [🔔] on my profile if you would want to be informed about developments on how I am helping on cultivating the innovators and entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Please do not hesitate to send a DM if this sounds like something you could be interested in.

Co-Founded the global community “Founders Sunday”. It serves as a non-profit educational platform and support for founders in all continents of the world (1300 + start-ups/scale-ups) 

The community meets up every Friday 1 pm CET on Zoom for lively discussions related to the founders' journey (#founderscoffee☕️) 

For founders - by founders 💡 

Co-founders/ founders:  Håvard, Emilie, Gunvor, Dr. David, Nadia, Evaldas, Elena and Gilles.

Welcome to the “Founders Sunday” group 🚀

Rubrik

Heading Pune Site for Rubrik India. Building the Pune Engineering Team. 
Hiring Engineers with 8 to 13 years' experience in system software.

Pune Site Lead

SecureThings

Fractional Engineering Leadership - Guiding and advising on various aspects of Engineering including Product Architecture/Design, Processes, Org Design.

Senior Vice President of Engineering

API Securist

Played advisory role for API Securist from its early days.

Advisor

Diamanti

Building High Performance Hyperconverged Storage appliance and Software for Kubernetes (Datacenter, cloud)
-	Built and released our 1st version of K8s storage solution on AWS, GCP, which also runs on VMware and Baremetal in Datacenters (Private Cloud).
-	Rebuilt the storage team
-	Introduced in product licensing with trial, subscription and perpetual license
-	Worked on a multi-cluster management product
-	Wearing multiple hats at this startup – Engineering leader, PM, Architect
-	Bringing the rigor in software development

VP of Engineering

Veritas Technologies LLC

NBU, Data Protection and Governance Engineering (DPGE) - flagship product with $800M annual revenues
-	As part of leadership team, led NetBackup(NBU) development team of 200+ in Pune. 
-	Focus was on backup/restore of VMWare, Hyper-V, RH Virtualization (KVM), MongoDB, Cassandra, AzureStack, Nutanix, OpenStack, NAS, Deduplication to Cloud, telemetry, Security and Core Netbackup areas. 
-	Delivered 3 content rich NBU releases while improving product supportability which included support for following new workloads: OpenStack, Azurestack, MongoDB, Nutanix, Redhat Virtualization, and D-NAS. These new workloads will drive the revenue growth towards $1B.
-	Delivered 2 releases for Backup Exec and transitioned leadership to a different business unit.

Sr. Director, Development

BE, VSR (Backup and Recovery Group - BnR) - SMB focused, Backup/DR products, $140M revenues
-	Led the agile transformation and moved from an 18 months cadence to delivering 10 releases in 3 years with 200+ team
-	Improved product quality resulting in customer escalations to an all-time low.
-	Revived the product with new features and integration
-	Ensured Backup Exec remains at the forefront in SMB data protection for cloud, virtual and physical.

Symantec

BE CFT, SSR, BE. Cloud Engineering (Backup and Recovery Group - BnR) 	
-	Led the global engineering team of 115 for Backup Exec CFT (Sustenance Engg), Symantec System Recovery, and BE. Cloud.  
-	Established a quarterly cadence of BE maintenance releases which solved customer issues and provided timely platform support.

Backup Exec Group (Information Management Group - IMG)	
-	Focused on SME market products with a team of 240. Backup Exec (BE) was part of the BE product line which was the leader in SME market. Other major product was Symantec System Recovery (SSR). SSR was entirely delivered from India 
-	Managed multiple releases for BE and SSR. One of them was a complex BE release to add Windows 8/2012 support done in parallel for 2 code-lines/trunks by about 175 engineers in US and India.

Data Protection Group (DPG) having 1.3B USD business & NetBackup with 800M USD business 
-	Transitioned SSR product development from US to India (100+ engineers) which became the 3rd important product in DPG India portfolio.
-	Led a team of about 370 engineers (33% of the global team)
-	Key focus area was to improve communication across sites at multiple levels and improve the maturity of teams. Was also responsible for integration of common components team which was then merged into the Netbackup engineering team.

Backup Exec Group (Security and Data Management Group) - 400M $ product line  
-	Built a matured development team of 70 and laid a foundation for future product transitions while contributing to existing product releases.

Sr. Director, Developme

Information Foundation Group (Security and Data Management Group) (formerly called Enterprise Messaging Management Group) 	
-	Led multiple teams (150) focused on Information Risk Management. As part of this group, led archiving (Enterprise Vault/SE), and security (Symantec Mail Security for Domino, Symantec Web Security, IM Manager, and Symantec Scan Engine) products.
-	Ramped up the Enterprise Vault team and delivered 2 releases - Enterprise Vault was the market leader in Data archiving.

SME Group (Data Management Group)	
-	Transitioned Storage Exec (SE) product development from US to India. Grew the team from 13 people to 40+ over few months. SE was a SRM product on windows platform which provides reporting, file blocking and quota management.
-	With VERITAS merging with Symantec in 2005, merged SE with Enterprise Vault (EV) - FSA which is an archival Product.

Director, Development

Veritas Software India PrivateLimited.

Products included Volume Manager (VM), Clustered VM, SAN VM and Switch based VM.
-	Moved into management role and grew the team of 30 to 100. Instrumental in setting up the first dedicated escalations team in the company.
-	Led 3 complex components of VM/CVM:
	DMP - Dynamic Multi-Pathing: This component alone is responsible for buying decisions of more than 50% of the customers. 
	FMR - Fast Mirror Resync (FlashSnap) – Instant Snapshot capability
	Allocator (Intelligent Storage Provisioning - ISP) – Intent aware allocations. This was an early version of Software Defined Storage.
-	Initiated multiple research prototypes which later became part of the product – one of the more innovative one was supporting online upgrades for VM.

Senior Manager

Implemented Rolling Upgrade support for Clustered VM (CVM) and other capabilities for Veritas Cluster Volume Manager.

Individual Contributor

Sun Microsystems

In the initial few months worked at Wipro office in Cupterino for SUN providing technical support for ISVs developing device drivers on the Solaris platform, and/or porting drivers from SUNOS to Solaris.
Subsequently for about 1.5 years worked as Escalation engineer at SUN's Menlo Park campus as a contractor through Wipro. The responsibilities were debugging and fixing issues in Solaris/SunOS OS/Kernel.

Contractor (Sr. Engineer and Software Specialist at Wipro)

Wipro Infotech

Part of Workstations group. Was responsible for writing multiple device drivers on SUNOS/Solaris.

Sr. Software Engineer

An astute leader building world-class products, growing teams and delivering exceptional business results. Fostering innovation by challenging the status quo and encouraging new thinking (for process as well as technology).

I am a Senior IT professional valued for my strong strategic technical leadership and innovative mindset. I am passionate about innovation/R&D and I strive to build innovative culture in my team. Being a hands-on manager and visionary technical leader, I have a natural flair for being able to combine problem-solving with creativity and communication while developing, directing, and leading teams.

Driving large teams ranging from 100 to 350+ across US and India.

Over two decades of my career, I have proven record of accomplishments in:
Developing Product strategy | Roadmap | Patenting new technologies | Product releases | Developing future leaders | Innovation | Cross-functional Leadership | Agile | Waterfall.
 
I have delivered key capabilities in:
Data Protection, DR, Backup, Storage Management, Clustering, Virtualization, Archival, E-Discovery, Security. 

Currently building Storage and Management products for Kubernetes environments at Diamanti.com which   is solving the persistent storage problems for customers running high performance apps in Kubernetes clusters.

During my last stint @ Veritas, I worked in the capacity of Engineering Leader (part of leadership team) for Veritas’ flagship product. Supervised a team of ~200 as part of Netbackup Engineering (800M USD annual revenues).

About me:
I am a technologist at heart and actively research to enrich my insights for discussions with peers, customers, and technical teams that I interact with. I believe in leadership style that focuses on transparency, listening, and providing a sense of direction to the team. Driven by the belief that the front-line employees are key and the leader is a steward who works with the team by asking the right questions and not by telling them how. 

Learning about diet, weight loss and health are areas of my extracurricular interests.

Available for discussion on vivekvgupta@yahoo.com

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Vivek Gupta

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