Neo Technology Leadership Team
Leadership Team
Emil Eifrém, CEO
Emil Eifrem is CEO of Neo Technology and co-founder of the Neo4j project. Before founding Neo, he was the CTO of Windh AB, where he headed the development of highly complex information architectures for Enterprise Content Management Systems. Committed to sustainable open source, he guides Neo along a balanced path between free availability and commercial reliability. Emil is a frequent conference speaker and author on NOSQL databases.
Lars Nordwall, COO
Lars has an outstanding track record of entrepreneurial leadership and managing diverse, fast growing businesses. Before joining Neo, Lars was SVP of Business Developments and then Worldwide Sales at Pentaho, where he orchestrated a company turn-around with 100%+ annual booking growth as a result. Before Pentaho, Lars was the VP of Worldwide Sales at SugarCRM, where he ramped the firm from an unknown start-up to a global firm with over 4000 customers. Lars has a MS in Mechanical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology and an Executive Education Program at Harvard Business School.
Johan Svensson, CTO
Johan Svensson is CTO of Neo Technology and co-founder of the Neo4j project. Johan has been concentrating on the details of high performance and concurrency in sofware development. He is the brain behind many of the optimizations and implementations that make Neo4j the fastest and leanest NOSQL database on the market today. Johan has 10+ years of professional programming in Java and related technologies. Before founding Neo, he was the Chief Developer at Windh AB.
Peter Neubauer, VP Community
Peter originally dreamed up the idea of a persistence engine based on networks in 2000 and subsequently worked with Emil and Johan to draft what was to become the world's leading graph database. After a short stint holding different positions in other companies as Software Manager for Java Development, Software Architecture, Agile Development and Mobile Systems, Peter returned to Neo and is working on developing the Neo4j community.
Jim Webber, Chief Scientist and VP Engineering
Jim is the Chief Scientist and VP Engineering at Neo Technology. Before joining Neo, Jim was Director of Professional Services at ThoughtWorks. Jim has a Ph.D. in Computing Science from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Björn Granvik, Director of Engineering
Björn has more than two decades of experience as a developer, architect, project leader and manager. Born in Pascal, fostered in C/C++ and reborn in Java, he still believes that "code matters" - second only to people and competence. Prior to joining Neo, Björn was the CTO of Jayway for 10 years and played a significant role in building the company from scratch into a 150 person expert consultancy. Björn created Øredev - an international developer's conference with more than a thousand attendees. He holds a MSc. in Computer Science and Engineering from Lund Institute of Technology at Lund University, Sweden.
Ian Robinson, Director of Customer Success
Ian is a co-author of REST in Practice (O’Reilly) and a contributor to the forthcoming REST: From Research to Practice (Springer) and Service Design Patterns (Addison-Wesley). Before joining Neo, he was Principal Technology Consultant at ThoughtWorks. He holds a BA from the University of Birmingham.
Board
Rod Johnson, Chairman
Rod Johnson is an authority on enterprise Java development and a leading open source entrepreneur. Rod created the Spring Framework and served as CEO of SpringSource until its acquisition by VMware. He holds a BA with Honors in Computer Science, Mathematics and Musicology as well as a PhD from the University of Sydney. Rod is currently SVP, Application Platform Strategy at VMware.
Emil Eifrém, Director
Emil Eifrem is CEO of Neo Technology and co-founder of the Neo4j project. Before founding Neo, he was the CTO of Windh AB, where he headed the development of highly complex information architectures for Enterprise Content Management Systems. Committed to sustainable open source, he guides Neo along a balanced path between free availability and commercial reliability. Emil is a frequent conference speaker and author on NOSQL databases.
Chris Barchak, Director
Chris joined Fidelity Growth Partners Europe in 2010 as a Principal. He has previously held a variety of operational roles in high-growth technology companies. Most recently, he was Director of European Business Development at BetweenMarkets, and Director of Product Marketing at Nexagent. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Engineering from MIT.
Magnus Christerson, Director
Magnus Christerson is Vice President, Products at Intentional Software Corporation. He drives the commercialization and go-to-market strategies of Intentional Software's ground-breaking technology. Prior to joining Intentional, Christerson was instrumental in building an industry leadership position for Rational Rose, the leading UML product for visually designing software applications. Christerson joined Rational in 1995 when Rational acquired Objectory, a Swedish software startup where he held various software development and product management roles. He holds a MSc. in Computer Science and Engineering from Lund Institute of Technology at Lund University, Sweden.
Nikolaj Nyholm, Director
Nikolaj Nyholm is an accomplished Internet Entrepreneur who has spent the last 12 years pushing the forefront of internet infrastructure projects through commercial ventures or community activity. Nikolaj is Partner at Sunstone Capital, which he joined in 2010, after working at Polar Rose: an image recognition company and World Economic Forum 2008 Technology Pioneer (later to be acquired by Apple, AAPL). Prior to Polar Rose, Nikolaj founded Speednames/Ascio, the company which supplied the first global domain name search (acquired by Group NBT, NBT.L); Imity, a mobile presence application (merged with Zyb and acquired by Vodafone, VOD.L); and Organic Network, a now-defunct wi-fi startup whose legacy is OpenWRT.org, the leading open source wi-fi project. Nikolaj is founding investor of CloudMade, the open geodata company behind OpenStreetMap.org, advisor to Mojang (Minecraft), and board member of Neo Technology, InfoHubble, and Microtask.
Sami Ahvenniemi, Director
Sami is founding partner of Conor Venture Partners and has been working in VC business since 2002. Previously Sami has held various executive management positions at SSH Communications Security (Nasdaq OMX:SSH1V) in Finland and in the Silicon Valley.
Johan Svensson, Director
Johan Svensson is CTO of Neo Technology and co-founder of the Neo4j project. Johan has been concentrating on the details of high performance and concurrency in sofware development. He is the brain behind many of the optimizations and implementations that make Neo4j the fastest and leanest NOSQL database on the market today. Johan has 10+ years of professional programming in Java and related technologies. Before founding Neo, he was the Chief Developer at Windh AB.
Advisors
Eric Ries, Advisor
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. In 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.
Marko A. Rodriguez, Advisor
Dr. Marko A. Rodriguez has worked in the academic and commercial sectors as an expert in both the theoretical and applied aspects of graphs. As a Director's Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Rodriguez developed an algebra for traversing graphs that has served as the foundation for the Gremlin graph traversal language. Commercially, Dr. Rodriguez has applied graphs to problems at AT&T as a Graph Systems Architect and currently in his own private, graph-based consulting firm, Aurelius LLC.