Management Team
The members of StackSafe's management team have decades of business experience, technological innovation and proven success in creating products and solutions that improve IT performance and reduce costs related to software infrastructure testing.
Loren Burnett, President and CEO
Andrew Gross, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Architect
Cal Jeffrey, Vice President of Sales
Letitia Larry, Director of Engineering Services
Jonah Paransky, Vice President of Marketing
Carolyn Turbyfill, Ph.D., Vice President of Engineering
Loren Burnett, President and CEO
Loren Burnett founded StackSafe in December of 2005. As President and CEO, he is responsible for leadership, day-to-day corporate operations, establishing the organization's strategic direction, and investor relations. Burnett also serves as a member of the company's Board of Directors.
Burnett brings over 28 years of management experience to the position. Before he founded StackSafe, Burnett was the COO and CFO of Astral Brands, a consumer brand management company. During his tenure, he oversaw the explosive growth of Astral's revenue base, which increased in excess of 100 percent during a 15-month period. Prior to joining Astral, Burnett served as the President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Celcorp, a provider of enterprise application integration software and services.
Burnett also served as Senior Vice President and CFO of Riptech, Inc., a leading provider of managed security services. He was instrumental in the cash sale of the firm to Symantec, Inc. for $145 million in August of 2002. Shareholder profits from this transaction exceeded $100 million.
Burnett's entrepreneurial experiences include co-founding FutureNext Consulting, an organization that grew to more than $72 million in annualized revenues. Burnett also has a track record of returning value to investors. He served as CFO at The Hunter Group, where he led their IPO initiative. Subsequently, Renaissance Worldwide, Inc. acquired Hunter, resulting in profits to the company's shareholders in excess of $150 million.
Additionally, Burnett has held senior management positions with NTS, MAXM Systems Corp., MCI, and Coopers & Lybrand. He served as treasurer of Make-A-Wish Foundation of the Mid-Atlantic, and has served on its board of directors.
Andrew Gross, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Architect
Andrew Gross has over 16 years of experience in the design, development, administration and security of complex IT operations systems. In his current role as Chief Scientist and Architect at StackSafe, Gross is responsible for product architecture, evaluation of new technologies and research efforts.
An expert in DSP algorithm design, architectural evaluation and source code review, Gross has extensive experience providing strategic consultation to companies on a variety of mission-critical operations and security issues.
Prior to joining StackSafe, Gross served as a key software architect for Zenph Studios, an entertainment technology company. Gross also held the title of Chief Architect for Counterpane Internet Security, where he was responsible for the design of production operations and real-time forensic analysis systems in support of the Secure Operations Center.
Gross conducted security research for the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), where he was responsible for covering a broad range of areas, including dynamic network monitoring and kernel auditing. In addition, he developed new tools for intrusion analysis and tracing and eventual system recovery. He also served as a network and security administrator for SDSC.
Gross received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1997, where he wrote the seminal dissertation on computer forensic analysis.
Cal Jeffrey, Vice President of Sales
With a career spanning nearly 20 years, which has encompassed both the private and public sectors as well as VAR channel development, Cal Jeffrey is a veteran of the ever-changing field of technology sales. As the Vice President of Sales for StackSafe, Jeffrey is responsible for building and executing direct and indirect sales efforts. Throughout his career, Jeffrey has built and maintained key executive-level client relationships for large and international accounts.
Prior to joining StackSafe, Jeffrey was the Director of Sales with NeuStar, Inc., the world's leading provider of managed IP services. While at NeuStar, he developed a sales team to service the IP infrastructure needs of Fortune 500 enterprise accounts. In this role, Jeffrey increased revenue by leveraging proprietary technology across a diverse customer base.
Jeffrey has supported sales representatives across multi-disciplinary product suites. He has recruited, hired and managed local and international sales forces for industry-leading organizations, including Check Point Software Technologies, Silicon Graphics Inc., Softdesk Inc. and CyBiz, Inc.
Letitia Larry, Director of Engineering Services
Letitia Larry has more than 14 years of experience in technical customer support and quality assurance. As StackSafe’s Director of Engineering Services, Larry is responsible for developing and maintaining a world-class customer experience and corporate quality goals – including administration of the StackSafe support organization, software quality assurance lab and business continuity practices.
Prior to joining StackSafe, Larry was the Director of Quality Assurance and Technical Support at Secure Software, Inc. (acquired by Fortify) where she successfully directed technical customer support, quality assurance, testing, configuration management and the technical writing staff.
Larry also worked as a Consulting Manager/Quality Expert at Systems Engineering Services Corporation where she analyzed systems associated with a billion dollar enterprise resource planning product line to determine and resolve issues associated with producing a quality product through the software development lifecycle. Larry served as a mentor to senior management and executive staff to implement and reconfigure processes, staff according to technical needs, and provide continuous onsite support to end users. In addition, Larry assisted the company in implementing the Rational Unified Process and the reorganization of the product engineering groups.
In previous positions, Larry has managed operations support and logistics for network monitoring, translation and transference tools companies.
Larry holds a Master of Science in Information Systems and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics.
Jonah Paransky, Vice President of Marketing
Jonah Paransky is a seasoned marketing executive whose career has spanned every stage of the corporate life cycle. He has served in a variety of roles, ranging from the director of a tier-one global services product management team to the director of product management and marketing for a fast-growth, venture-funded start-up. At StackSafe, Paransky is responsible for the development of marketing strategies, product management and customer support.
Previously, as Symantec's Director of Product Management for Global Managed Security Services, Paransky led an overhaul of the managed services delivery platform, including the adoption of ITIL best practices and a redesign of core services and pricing. Also during his tenure at Symantec, Paransky directed the product management team that was charged with the integration and globalization of Riptech's acquired managed services offerings. His efforts resulted in a 97 percent compound annual growth rate over a four-year period.
Prior to the acquisition of Riptech by Symantec in 2002, Paransky served as its Director of Product Management. In this role he supervised product strategy and definition, product launches, marketing activities, public relations, competitive analysis, product life cycle management, pricing, channel marketing and relationships with key technology vendors.
As an analyst for Broadview International LLC, Paransky assessed technology markets and trends to develop acquisition and positioning strategies.
Paransky received a Bachelor's of Science degree in Engineering and a Bachelor's of Arts degree in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Carolyn Turbyfill, Ph.D., Vice President of Engineering
Carolyn Turbyfill has 25 years of engineering management and product development experience, having worked with start-up technology firms as well as mature companies. At StackSafe, Turbyfill manages the development and engineering teams that generate StackSafe products.
Turbyfill has a consistent track record of translating innovation into business value through the implementation of cross-functional development teams and processes. As Vice President of Engineering at Immunix (acquired by Novell in 2005), she implemented the uniform development practices and infrastructure that enabled the company to achieve record delivery performance.
In her role as Vice President of Engineering for Counterpane Internet Security (acquired by British Telecom), Turbyfill eliminated customer-visible failures; developed QA, staging and deployment practices that enabled multiple weekly updates to the worldwide distributed service; integrated new customers in less than a day; and achieved 100 percent service uptime. As Vice President of Engineering and Operations at First Virtual Holdings, Turbyfill managed service operations and development, redefining product architecture and helping to facilitate the sale of the company to Softbank in 1998. At Sun Microsystems, as Director of Engineering at the Internet Commerce Group, she built the very first firewall appliance, as well as one of the first commercial TCP/IP VPNs.
Turbyfill received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University where she wrote numerous publications and articles on database systems and performance benchmarking.