"The cybersecurity industry is complex, particularly on the go-to-market side. When evaluating VC's, we were looking for a partner to help us navigate that complexity to accelerate our time-to-market. Lockstep brings deep domain expertise and an extensive network of practitioners, both pivotal for the success of our startup. They are also very fun to work with! If you've got a strong team and big ambitions, you couldn't ask for a better partner! -Dain Sundstrom
Dain Sundstrom, David Phillips, Anders Holden, and Matt Stephenson
Dain Sundstrom is the CEO of Iceguard, and has more than 25 years experience of building, operation and securing large distributed systems. He began his career in the Java EE space as part of the original JBoss team and later the founder of Apache Geronimo. After that he held senior architect roles at Ning and Proofpoint, before joining Facebook in 2012. At Facebook, he created Trino (formerly Presto) with David Phillips, and grew it to support the vast majority of Facebook's analytics infrastructure, including their ads platform. They also built it into one of the largest open-source analytics platforms in the world. In 2019, he co-founded Starburst, and set the technical direction as co-CTO leading to a $3.3bn valuation in 2021.
David Phillips is the CTO of IceGuard, and has more than 25 years experience of building large scale data platforms, starting his career building backend systems for rapidly scaling e-commerce platforms such as GeekTech, AdKnowledge and Amazon.com. He worked with Dain at Ning, and Proofpoint, and also joined Facebook in 2012 to create Trino. In 2019, he co-founded Starburst with Dain, and led a number of deep technical projects as co-CTO.
Matt Stephenson is the Chief Architect of IceGuard, and has more than 20 years of building and operating infrastructure at large, rapidly growing companies. He was an early employee at Amazon, helping to build their distributed scheduling system. He worked with Dain and David at Ning and Proofpoint, and then went on to hold senior engineering positions at Google, Square and Oracle Cloud, where he was the architect for Oracle functions. In 2021, he joined Starburst as the main architect of Starburst Galaxy, their managed SaaS data platform.
Anders Holden is the Chief Product Officer of Iceguard, and has more than 10 years experience building analytics products across cloud infrastructure and security. He started his career as a management consultant with McKinsey, where helped build QuantumBlack into their flagship Analytics and AI offering after the acquisition in 2016. After that, he held product management leadership roles at AWS and Verkada, before joining Starburst as Director of Product.
