Juergen Lindner - CMO, Calix
Juergen Lindner joined SAP's B2B marketplace spinout in 2000, a startup that generated $120 million in revenue by 2001 before being folded back into the parent company. He stayed at SAP for nearly 14 years. As global VP of go-to-market and sales enablement, he oversaw a growth portfolio worth more than €10 billion across SaaS, PaaS, IoT, and analytics, raised conversion rates 30% to 50% over traditional pipeline methods, and handled go-to-market integration for acquisitions including SuccessFactors, Ariba, and Concur. Oracle brought him in as VP of SaaS product marketing in 2016, and he rose to SVP and CMO of Oracle Cloud Applications. He also co-founded Evise.ai, a generative AI platform for advisory and consulting firms. ServiceNow hired him in 2025 to lead product and solution marketing for technology workflows, where he ran the narrative around autonomous IT and handled post-merger integration for the Armis and Veza acquisitions. Lindner became CMO of Calix in September 2026.
Mandy Dhaliwal - CMO, Nutanix
Five of the companies where Mandy Dhaliwal has worked were acquired. Legato Systems went to EMC, SOASTA to Akamai, BlazeMeter to CA Technologies, Fugue to Snyk, and Boomi to TPG and Francisco Partners. Her first marketing job was at a Canadian telecom carrier in Vancouver. Storage software followed at Legato and then EMC, where she spent four years as senior director of software marketing. Performance testing came next at SOASTA and BlazeMeter, then cloud governance at Fugue, then integration software at Boomi, where as CMO she expanded the business from midmarket to enterprise and doubled marketing-sourced pipeline. Nutanix hired her in April 2022. Dhaliwal has led the company's repositioning from hyperconverged infrastructure to a hybrid multicloud and AI platform, built competitive programs that drove record customer acquisition, and turned the customer conference into an industry event. She received the 2025 Bay Area CMO ORBIE Award in the Large Enterprise category and is a founding member of CMO Huddles.
Adrian Fung - Global CMO, eBay
A message board company is where Adrian Fung learned marketing. He co-founded CoolBoard.com in 1999, grew it into one of the top 500 websites by page views within a year, then pivoted the business to enterprise SaaS when the advertising market collapsed, lifting average customer value from under $100,000 to more than $400,000. Intuit hired him next, where he introduced a freemium model to QuickBooks that increased new customer growth by more than 30% and led a 50-person task force that held Microsoft to less than 2% share before it abandoned the market. His acquisition work at oDesk and Upwork tripled paid search customers and doubled website conversion rates. Then came six and a half years at Sam's Club, where he built digital performance marketing from scratch, led the entire marketing organization of more than 100 people, and ran the advertising business, growing ad revenue more than tenfold in five years to over $200 million. He was also the fastest associate ever to receive the Blue Coat, the company's highest lifetime achievement award. eBay named him global CMO in November 2022.
Carrie Palin - SVP & CMO, Cisco
Sixteen years at Dell shaped Carrie Palin's approach. She held roles across brand management, field marketing, partner marketing, and international business development, eventually leading global server solutions product marketing through Dell's largest server portfolio launch and running demand generation for a $17 billion enterprise business. IBM then hired her to lead marketing for its cloud data services and analytics division. Silicon Valley SaaS came after that. She became the first CMO at Box, then CMO at SendGrid, which Twilio acquired months later, then CMO at Splunk, where she led a full corporate rebrand during a growth phase. Cisco appointed her SVP and CMO in June 2021, with brand strategy, partner marketing, global field marketing, events, customer advocacy, and cisco.com in her remit. Palin also serves on the boards of NetApp, where she chairs the talent and compensation committee, and DemandScience.
Lara Balazs - CMO & EVP, Global Marketing, Adobe
Retail and apparel came first for Lara Balazs. She worked in brand management at Gap, spent two years in marketplace marketing at Nike, then returned to Gap as director of global adult brand management. Visa kept her for 11 years. She moved from senior director of US marketing to head of global marketing strategy and planning, then global innovation marketing, then SVP of North America marketing, the company's largest revenue region. Amazon brought her in to lead marketing for Prime globally and the North America consumer business. Intuit then made her CMO in 2018 and later expanded the job to EVP and general manager of the Strategic Partner Group, giving her P&L responsibility for the ProTax business alongside marketing, communications, corporate responsibility, and partnerships with financial institutions. Adobe hired her as CMO and EVP of global marketing in December 2024. Her career began as a senior associate at the brand consultancy Prophet.
Stephanie Fried - EVP & CMO, McAfee
Stephanie Fried started a product company at 22. She designed the goods, packaging, and logos, built the website, and placed her products in 125 retail stores across more than 15 states, including Anthropologie. Research became her craft after that, first at BuzzBack, then at NBC Universal, where she ran digital primary research and launched a quarterly study with Hulu on the full episode player. At VEVO she quadrupled the research team and helped reposition the brand as a standalone property rather than a YouTube channel, lifting awareness 50%. Condé Nast promoted her from SVP to EVP in 14 months. There she oversaw 150 marketers and researchers across 18 brands, grew the digital audience from 81 million comScore visitors to 122 million, and created the Condé Nast Performance Lab. Fandom then had her build a full-stack marketing team from scratch across more than 15 disciplines, work that contributed to doubling revenue and tripling EBITDA. McAfee named her EVP and CMO in March 2025.
Sunil Frida - CMO, Zscaler
Products, solutions, and alliances at Harmonic were where Sunil Frida spent his first seven years, followed by leadership roles at Redwood Systems and GE Digital. AWS then gave him seven years and an unusually broad portfolio. As general manager of product marketing he led go-to-market for $20 billion worth of analytics, databases, machine learning, IoT, quantum computing, and robotics, launching more than 100 products and services while the company grew from roughly $18 billion to over $100 billion. Cybersecurity came next. At CrowdStrike he ran product marketing, technical marketing, competitive intelligence, alliances, and analyst relations, rebuilt the organization, and established five new product categories around an AI and data narrative. Zscaler hired him as CMO in January 2026. His brief covers brand, category creation, demand, product marketing, analyst strategy, and building a go-to-market engine aimed at Fortune 100 CIOs.
Shashi Kiran - CMO, Nile
Six CMO or chief product officer roles appear on Shashi Kiran's record, at portfolios ranging from under $1 million to more than $100 billion. Appcito was the first, an eight-month stint that ended with A10 Networks acquiring the company. Quali followed, where he launched its first SaaS offering. At Aryaka Networks he served as both CMO and chief product officer for more than three years, rebuilding the marketing and product management teams and refreshing messaging as the company scaled past $100 million in revenue. Fortanix, VMware, and Check Point came next, the VMware role covering the $2 billion NSX portfolio. Nile hired him as CMO in July 2025 to build global brand, go-to-market, pipeline, and partnerships. Advising runs alongside the operating work. Kiran has mentored startups through Google Launchpad and sat on advisory boards for companies including Ushur and Scrut Automation, with portfolio exits to VMware, Cisco, IBM, and A10 Networks. He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Raj Sarkar - CMO, CloudBees
Raj Sarkar spent his first year at Google marketing a product that never launched, Google Talk for Meetings, which eventually became Google Hangouts. He tells that story himself, along with a joke about leaving a comfortable job to become head of marketing at two early-stage startups, and compares the experience to a character on the HBO series Silicon Valley. The rest of that Google chapter was more conventional: he led product marketing for Google Cloud Platform and launched Google Compute Engine. Atlassian then kept him for six years across Bitbucket, Trello, Confluence, HipChat, and Stride, including a Trello brand campaign in Times Square. He was CMO of Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, then the first CMO at 1Password, which he joined as a board advisor and where he oversaw a commercial featuring Ryan Reynolds as the company reached a $6.7 billion valuation. CloudBees named him CMO in October 2023, where he launched a new brand and amplified the company's position as a profitable business above $150 million in ARR. Forbes named him to its Entrepreneurial CMO list in 2022.
Antonio Lucio - EVP, Global CMO, PayPal
Antonio Lucio became Visa's first global CMO in 2007 and participated in the roadshow for its IPO. Over seven years there he built the company's first global positioning and brand identity system, consolidated six independent operating units into one global team, and later added corporate strategy and M&A to his responsibilities. Visa rose from 36th to fifth in BrandZ's most valuable brands ranking during his tenure. HP hired him in 2015 as its first global chief marketing and communications officer following the corporate split, where total company valuation increased by more than 50% and he brought a significant part of the media stack in house. Meta then made him global CMO, responsible for consumer marketing across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. He returned to HP in 2023 as EVP of marketing and corporate affairs, and joined PayPal in that same capacity in May 2026. In between, Lucio founded 5S Diversity, whose leadership program graduated close to 300 senior marketing leaders from 20 corporations in three years. He is an executive fellow at Yale School of Management and a member of three marketing halls of fame.
Where the P&L Meets the Pitch
Count how many people here have carried revenue responsibility rather than just marketing budgets and the number is striking. General manager roles, ProTax at Intuit, an advertising business at Sam's Club, product management alongside marketing at Aryaka, a founded company or two. San Jose rewards that, because most of what these companies sell requires someone who can hold a technical conversation and a commercial one in the same meeting. The city's marketing leaders tend to be people who have sat on the other side of the table first.