Board of Directors

Ed Bednarcik President and CEO

Bednarcik brings a wealth of experience in strategically building companies from early-stage to large multi-billion dollar market leaders. 

Most recently, Bednarcik led Wright Line, a Worcester, Mass.- based company previously owned by Oaktree Capital Management and GSC, before completing a sale to Eaton Corporation in August 2010.  Prior to leading Wright Line, Bednarcik was an early employee of A123 Systems, a leading supplier of high-power lithium-ion batteries, where he served as vice president and general manager.  A123 was the largest IPO on the NASDAQ in 2009 and its early investors included Qualcomm, Motorola, Sequoia Capital and North Bridge Venture Partners.  Bednarcik has also held key executive roles at American Power Conversion (APC) including corporate officer, vice president of global sales, and vice president and general manager of the Business Network Solutions Group – the company’s largest division with more than $1B in sales.  As sales leader at APC, Bednarcik was responsible for more than $2B in annual revenue prior to its acquisition by Schneider Electric.

Don Bulens

Don Bulens is an industry veteran with extensive experience in strategically building companies from early-stage to large market leaders. As former president and CEO of EqualLogic, Bulens led the company to success in the high performance iSCSI storage area network (SAN) market and ultimately to an acquisition by Dell for $1.375 billion. Throughout his career, he has propelled emerging companies into leadership positions by devising and executing on innovative channel strategies that led to broad customer adoption. During his tenure at EqualLogic, its channel program was one of the fastest-growing and highly regarded in the storage industry, delivering an extensive portfolio of tools and resources to help partners achieve and maintain competitive advantage.

Prior to his position with EqualLogic, Bulens served as CEO of Trellix Corporation, a leading provider of OEM Web publishing tools for consumers and small businesses, which was acquired by Interland (now NASDAQ: WEB) in 2003. Before Trellix, Bulens played a central role in driving the widespread market adoption of Lotus Notes. At Lotus, Bulens spearheaded the strategy and implementation that led to the creation of the industry of more than 18,000 companies that developed and marketed applications and services based on Lotus Notes. 

Axel Bichara Partner, Atlas Venture

Axel Bichara is a Partner in the technology group. He joined Atlas Venture in 1993 and focuses on software investments.

Before coming to Atlas Venture, he was Vice President of Product Development at Premise, a venture-backed software company which he co-founded in 1987. Premise was acquired by Computervision in 1991. Among the companies Axel has funded, he was first round lead investor in SolidWorks (acquired by Dassault Sytemes), SpeechWorks (IPO, later merged with Nuance) and Phase Forward (IPO, later acquired by Oracle).

Axel currently serves on the Boards of Atlas portfolio companies CloudSwitch, EnglishCentral, Globoforce, Marathon, NaviNet, OwnerIQ, Pixtronix, Recorded Future and VideoIQ.

Axel holds an MBA from INSEAD, a Master of Science degree from MIT and a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Technical University Berlin.

Kenneth Boyda

Ken Boyda is a security industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience providing strategic direction for leading security companies, including GE Security, Inc. where he most recently held the position of president and chief executive officer. GE Security was formed through General Electric’s acquisition of Interlogix, Inc., a public company (NASDAQ) and leader in technology development and manufacturing for the electronic security industry.

Brian Paul Managing Director, Tenaya Capital

Brian Paul is a Managing Director of Tenaya Capital. He initially joined the predecessor to Tenaya (Lehman Brothers Venture Partners) in 1999, and co-founded Tenaya in 2009. Previously, Brian worked in Lehman Brothers’ Global Technology and Healthcare Investment Banking groups in New York, London and Los Angeles. Within these groups, Brian was responsible for public and private equity offerings as well as strategic advisory assignments. Before joining Lehman Brothers in 1994, Brian was at First Boston, where he was responsible for the purchase and sale of mortgage loan portfolios.

Brian holds an M.B.A. with distinction from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management and a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

David Skok General Partner, Matrix Partners

David Skok joined Matrix Partners as a General Partner in May 2001. He has a wealth of experience running companies. David started his first company in 1977 at age 22. Since then David has founded a total of four separate companies and performed one turn around. Three of these companies went public. He joined Matrix from SilverStream Software, which he founded in June 1996. Prior to its July 2002 acquisition by Novell, SilverStream was a public company that had reached a revenue run rate in excess of $100m, with approximately 800 employees and offices in more than 20 countries around the world.

David’s work as a value added investor is best known for helping JBoss take their Open Source business to a successful exit with their sale to Red Hat, and for helping both AppIQ and Tabblo from their inception to their sale to HP. David serves on the boards of Digium (makers of the very popular Asterisk Open Source PBX/telephony software), Diligent Technologies, OpenSpan, Solidworks, VideoIQ and Virtual Iron Software.

He holds a B.SC Honours Degree in Computer Science from the University of Sussex, England.