Mother Knows Best!

Raj Cherabuddi is President and Founder of Kickfire, the company that developed the first SQL chip for the MySQL data warehouse market. A seasoned executive, he is experienced in both the startup and corporate worlds. Cherabuddi co-founded Kickfire in 2006 and served as its CEO and President for over two years. Under his leadership the company raised Series A and B financing from top tier investors and successfully brought its first product to market.

Prior to Kickfire, Cherabuddi was the founding CEO of Sanera Systems, a startup that focused on mission-critical, high-performance SAN switches. Sanera was successfully acquired by McDATA Corporation, an $800M public company now part of Brocade. At McDATA, Cherabuddi served as the corporate CTO for nearly two years, where he advised on strategy and was responsible for future technologies.

Before co-founding Sanera Systems, he served as lead architect for Sun’s UltraSPARC IIIi processor. He also worked for Intel Corporation as a micro-architect in the Processor Group. During his early career he developed and was issued patents for 23 inventions.

Cherabuddi earned a B.S degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering from Osmania University and an M.S. degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University.

Steven Ketchpel is the Director of Analytics and Research at Mamasource, a free, local online Mother’s community. He has been working in website analytics for more than a decade, first as a co-founder of Vividence, and more recently as a consultant to both established and startup online search engines, etailers, non-profits and services. As a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow, he spent a year working with the Grameen Foundation on Mifos, open-source software for microfinance. He has published more than a dozen articles in the areas of software agents, digital libraries, electronic commerce and website usability. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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