Pica8 Company Culture

James Liao leads strategy and growth efforts for Pica8® as it shapes the open networking enterprise market. He has a proven track record in networking product innovation and development: before founding Pica8, James led product strategy for switching and data center products at original device manufacturer Quanta. He also built world-class engineering teams at both Woven Systems and 3UP Systems. Born in Taiwan, James holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. In a valley of Teslas, James drives his 1999 Toyota Minivan.

As COO, Niraj Jain leads all business operations for Pica8 including Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Product Management, and Support. He came to Pica8 from Vocera Communications, where as VP of Business Development, he led new market development, partnerships, M&A, and product strategy, helping the company grow from an early stage startup to a $100M+ business and a successful IPO. Niraj has over 25 years of experience in the networking industry having served earlier in leadership positions at SAN Valley Systems, 3Com, and Prodigy. He holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and Virginia Tech respectively, and has performed doctoral studies in Computer Networking at Columbia University.

Lu Feng leads the financial management of Pica8. She comes to Pica8 with more than 17 years of financial management experience in technology, semiconductor, and publishing companies. Prior to Pica8, Lu led the corporate accounting team at Alpha and Omega Semiconductor, and she has previous financial management experiences with Intersil, Philips Semiconductor, and Knight-Ridder. She holds a BA in business administration from the University of Hawaii.

Sharad Ahlawat leads all architecture and solution development for Pica8. An industry veteran with over 20 years of in the trenches experience with SDN, Virtualization, OpenStack, Container, DPI, Security and Classification technologies working with enterprises and service providers developing solutions for their DataCenter, LAN, WAN and Internet infrastructure needs. Held various leadership roles in Engineering, Product Management and Consulting Engineering at TCS, Cisco, Qosmos, Procera and PLUMgrid.

Jeff Paine leads all marketing strategy and execution for Pica8. He has 30 years of marketing experience in the networking industry, starting his career as the very first (pre-IPO) marketing hire at Cisco, where he successfully popularized the then-arcane technology known as routing by inventing both the router icon and the brand iOS. Post Cisco Jeff has run marketing and/or business development for large public companies, such as UTStarcom, and has executed the marketing launches of a number of networking/security software companies, including NetCitadel and Tigera. Jeff holds a BA in Communications from Brown University and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin.