Meet Our Leaders

William (Bill) Welch (he/him) brings over 30 years of extensive experience in operationalizing and scaling product development and innovation, customer experience and expansion, talent acquisition and retention, and strategic alliances across the globe.

While at Talkdesk Bill served as the President and Chief Operating Officer where he led the Go To Market (GTM) organization. Prior to Talkdesk, Welch held executive leadership positions at Duo Security, Zscaler, and Symantec. 

While president and COO of Duo Security, he helped secure a $2.35 billion cash transaction with Cisco. As COO of Zscaler, he led the organization toward a dramatic expansion of employees and revenue, culminating in an industry-leading IPO and a $17 billion market capitalization.

Loris (he/him) is the Chief Technology Officer and founder of Sysdig. He is also the creator of the popular open source troubleshooting tool, sysdig, and the open source container security tool Falco. Prior to founding Sysdig, Loris co-created Wireshark, the open source network analyzer, which today has 20+ million users. Loris holds a PhD in computer engineering from Politecnico di Torino and lives in Davis, California.

Ping Li focuses on enterprise software application and datacenter platform investments at Accel. He is the lead investor and board member at Cognite, Jelly.ai, Klaviyo, Tailscale and Trifacta. Ping is also active in cybersecurity as an investor at Code42, Illumio, Lookout, Snyk, Sysdig and Tenable Network Security (NASDAQ).

He was responsible for numerous past investments with notable exits, including Arista (NASDAQ), Blue Jeans (acquired by Verizon), Cloudera (NYSE), Demisto (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Heptio (acquired by VMware), Nimble Storage (NYSE), RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce), Semmle (acquired by MSFT/GitHub), and Sumo Logic (NASDAQ). Prior to Accel, Ping served as product line manager and director of corporate development at Juniper Networks. He started his technology career in Asia working for Singapore Telecom and Goldman Sachs Asia’s technology practice.

Ping is from New Jersey and graduated from Harvard and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Alex is a Principal at Permira, where he focuses on Permira’s Growth strategy, which makes large-scale minority, non-control investments. He also covers investment opportunities in the Technology sector. Alex has worked on numerous transactions including FullStory, G2 and Seismic. He currently is a Board Observer at FullStory and G2. Prior to joining Permira, Alex was a Senior Vice President at TA Associates, where he led growth equity and buyout investments in the software, security, internet and digital media sectors. Prior to that, he worked at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital in Menlo Park, CA. He also worked in strategy and operations at DiscoverOrg. Alex has degrees in Business Administration and Psychology from University of Southern California, USA, and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, USA.

Sandesh Patnam is the US Managing Partner at Premji Invest, where he oversees their multi-strategy crossover fund with over $10bn in AUM across the Consumer, Technology, and Financial sectors. At PI, he directed investments in Anaplan (NYSE: PLAN), Zuora (NYSE: ZUO), Coupa (NYSE: COUP), Looker (acq. by Google for $2.85bn), Apttus (acq. by Thoma Bravo for $1.85bn), ServiceMax (acq. by GE for $1.0bn), Icertis, DataStax, Lookout, Cyngn, and Signifyd.

Prior to Premji Invest, Sandesh had a brief tenure as a partner as DFJ Growth, where he co-led investments in Cohesity, Stripe, and Innovium. He was also a Senior Equity Analyst and Investment Officer at the Seligman Technology Group at Ameriprise where he helped manage over $8bn in both long-only and long-short investment vehicles, in addition to leading their software and IT infrastructure equity portfolios. Before Seligman, Sandesh was a General Partner at Bay Partners, where he led several deals in their IT infrastructure and SaaS practices. Prior to his investing career, Sandesh held product and business roles at Malleable Technologies, Silicon Graphics, Integrated Device Technologies, and Cirrus Logic.

Sandesh earned an MBA from the Wharton Graduate School of Business, and a BS in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Economics from the University of Rochester. In his spare time, he is an avid squash player, and sits on the board of Squash On Track, a non-profit providing after-school athletics to students in under-served communities.

Enrique joined Bain Capital Ventures in 2014, where he focuses on infrastructure software and services with a specialization in cybersecurity. He is chairman of the board for FireEye and sits on the board of DocuSign and Atlassian, along with a number of private companies. Enrique was previously the president and CEO of Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) and brings more than 27 years of executive experience in technology and security to Bain Capital Ventures. Through his 19 years at the global leader for security, backup, and availability solutions, Enrique also served as the executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing and president of consumer products. Before Symantec, he was president and CEO of Brightmail, the leading anti-spam software company acquired by Symantec in 2004.

In March 2011, Enrique was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Management Advisory Board. He currently serves on the boards of several portfolio companies, including DocuSign, and serves independently on the boards of FireEye, Atlassian and ForeScout.

Enrique was named 2004 Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, and 2007 Corporate Executive of the Year by Hispanic Net. Enrique received his Bachelor of Arts in computer science from Dartmouth College.

Since June 2000, Mr. Schwartz has been Managing Partner of Third Point Ventures, the Menlo Park, California based venture capital arm of Third Point LLC, which is a registered investment adviser based in New York and the investment manager of the Third Point Funds. Mr. Schwartz is presently a director of Sysdig, CipherTrace, Kentik, Kumu Networks, Aryaka, Upstart (Nasdaq:UPST), Precision Hawk, R2 Semiconductor, Rubicon Labs, SentinelOne, YellowBrick Data, Ushur, and Catalytic.

Previously he led investments in Radia Communications (acquired by Texas Instruments), LitePoint (acquired by Teradyne), Global Locate (Acquired by Broadcom), EnPhase Energy (Nasdaq : ENPH), Apigee (Nasdaq: APIC, Acquired by Alphabet/GOOG), IQ Engines (Acquired by Yahoo!), Elastica (acquired by BlueCoat), Swift Financial (Acquired by PayPal), CloudVelox (acquired by VMWare), and Packet (acquired by Equinix). Previously, for 23 years, Mr. Schwartz was the President of RF Associates North, a privately held communications semiconductor manufacturer’s representative firm. Mr. Schwartz holds a multi-discipline engineering degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

Eric Wolford joined Accel in 2014 and focuses on enterprise infrastructure companies. He leverages his infrastructure and IT experience in working with founders across the enterprise stack, from next-gen analytics platforms like Jut, to emerging cloud security and threat detection companies like Netskope and Vectra. Eric also co-leads the Accel Tech Council.

Prior to Accel, Eric spent years in a variety of product and management roles at FastForward Networks, Inktomi and most recently, at Riverbed where he was president of the products group. There, he oversaw the growth of Riverbed’s flagship WAN optimization and app acceleration platforms, which grew to be a USD $1 billion+ business.

Eric is from the Bay Area, graduated from Pepperdine and has an MBA from NYU. 

accel.com/team/eric-wolford

Suresh (he/him) has served as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Sysdig, Inc. since February 2018. Prior to joining Sysdig, Suresh was the president and CEO of Nimble Storage, Inc. His tenure extended from March 2011 until its acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in May 2017. During his time at the company, he led Nimble from a startup, through a successful IPO, and on to be a leading provider of next-generation flash storage systems and a pioneer in leveraging predictive analytics for infrastructure management, with more than $500 million in annualized revenues and over 10,000 customers.

Prior to Nimble Storage, he was the CEO of Omneon (acquired by Harmonic Inc.), and previously served as a member of the executive team at NetApp, overseeing all product operations. During a decade-long career at NetApp, Suresh led the company’s product strategy and product development and was a key architect of the steady expansion of NetApp’s product portfolio into new markets. Before joining NetApp, Suresh served at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chicago as a senior engagement manager.

He holds a B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering, with honors, from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, India and an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Calcutta, India.