• Former Plaxo CEO Ben Golub Joins Gluster, An Open Source Storage Platform Startup

    Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

    Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). → Learn More

    Back in March, long-time Plaxo President and CEO Ben Golub left the social address book company after five years. Today, he’s announcing his next move — he’s taking the reins at Gluster, a startup that offers an open source software solution for storing very large amounts of unstructured data. Golub will replace current CEO Hitesh Chellani who is transitioning to become VP of Operations.

    Golub says that during his time at Plaxo he experienced the struggles web companies have to go through to serve large amounts of data to large numbers of customers, which often involved quickly adding large amounts of storage capacity. He says that along with other Web 2.0 companies, large media companies like Comcast, which acquired Plaxo, have to deal with similar problems. Gluster helps deal with these issues, allowing services to use commodity hardware to store large amounts of data while also making it quickly retrievable (Gluster’s software will also work on enterprise-grade storage area networks).  The software has been downloaded around 100,000 times.

    “Ben Golub is the President and Chief Executive Officer for Plaxo. Prior to joining Plaxo, he was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for VeriSign, Inc. In his eight years at VeriSign, he also served as Senior Vice President of the security and payments business and General Manager of VeriSign’s managed security services business. In these roles, Ben managed worldwide sales, marketing, product development, support, operations, and business development activities. Prior to VeriSign, Ben held a number...

    Learn more
    Company: Plaxo
    Website: plaxo.com
    Launch Date: November 17, 2002
    Funding: $28.3M

    Plaxo helps keep people connected by solving the common and frustrating problem of out-of-date contact information. Users and their contacts store their information on Plaxo’s servers. When a user edits their own information, the changes appear in the address books of all those who listed the user in their own address books. Because contacts are stored in a central location, it’s possible to list connections between contacts and access the address book from anywhere. Napster co-founder, Sean Parker, was one...

    Learn more

    Tags: ,

    Sponsored Ads

    blog comments powered by Disqus

    Sponsored Ads

    Sponsored Ads

    Upcoming Events

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA