Meet the Leadership team

Prior to co-founding Liquibase, he was a Director at the Austin Technology Incubator and co-founded Phurnace Software, inventing their flagship product for middleware and infrastructure management. A US Army veteran, Robert holds an Economics degree from the University of Texas at Austin and an MS degree in Science and Technology Commercialization from the McCombs School of Business.

Prior to co-founding Datical (now Liquibase) Pete was a factotum for several Austin startups, most notably Phurnace (acquired by BMC), WholeSecurity (acquired by Symantec) & LoopOne (acquired by Neopost).

Nathan founded the Liquibase open-source project in 2006 and has over 20 years experience architecting and building software. He started Liquibase to enable easier tracking of database changes and it has since become the de facto standard for database change management. Nathan is focused on expanding the Liquibase community and providing strategic insight into the development of Liquibase products. Nathan holds BS degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Concordia College.

Aziz Gilani is a Managing Director at Mercury, where he focuses on investments in enterprise SaaS, Cloud and data science startups. Prior to joining Mercury, Aziz was a Senior Engagement Leader with Infosys Consulting, an early executive at ABB Performance Services, a Senior Consultant at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, and an Analyst at Lotus Development Corp. Aziz received his BBA from the University of Texas where he was a TILF Scholar, and his MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management where he was an FC Austin Scholar.In addition, Aziz is a graduate of the Kauffman Fellows Program through the Center for Venture Education, where he completed industry-defining field work on Seed Accelerators. Aziz is a recognized expert in Seed Accelerators, and has been quoted in several national publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, ReadWriteWeb, TechCocktail, and The Business Journals. Outside of Mercury, Aziz serves in advisory roles for the Mayor of Houston’s Tech and Innovation Council, Seed Accelerator Rankings, and SXSW Interactive. He is also an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business where he teaches a course on venture capital.

Rik joined RCC in 2004 and leads the HCIT and Medical Device practices. Rik currently serves on the boards of Modify Health, Netsertive and Liquibase. Prior to his twenty years in private equity, Rik gained experience working with venture backed companies in the strategy group of Scient, a global eBusiness consulting firm. Before Scient, Rik worked for four years at Accenture, first in the healthcare services group and then at the Internet Center of Excellence where he helped launch several venture-backed companies as well as worked on the team that developed the online music platform for BestBuy. Rik was previously on the board of Continuity Control which sold to Mitratech in 2021, BardyDx, which sold to Hillrom (NYSE: HRC) in 2021; Veran Medical, which sold to Olympus in 2020; APS, which sold to Relias Learning in 2017; EndoChoice, which had an IPO in 2015 (NYSE: GI) and sold to Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) in 2016; an observer on the board of Pioneer Surgical, which sold to RTI Surgical (Nasdaq: RTIX) in 2013; and on the board of Fullscope (sold to Edgewater (Nasdaq: EDGW) in 2009. Rik graduated from Vanderbilt University where he received his BE in Mechanical Engineering, and he received an MBA from Duke University.

Brian R. Smith is the founder of S3 Ventures and serves as its Managing Director. At age 29, he founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Crossroads Systems (Nasdaq: CRDS). He led Crossroads through five rounds of venture, strategic and mezzanine financing and to a successful IPO in 1999. Brian ran Crossroads as a public company for nearly four years. In this role, Brian was an early pioneer in Storage Area Networks (“SANs”), which are industry standard solutions today. For his efforts, he was awarded the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2000. He spent the first seven years of his career in electrical engineering positions holding product development roles within the Technology Group of the IBM Corporation. Brian earned a BSEE with honors from the University of Cincinnati and an MSEE from Purdue University. He served on the board of Acessa Health (acquired by Hologic), Briggo (acquired by Coca-Cola), Crossroads Systems (NASDAQ: CRDS), Favor (acquired by HEB Grocery), Gravitant (acquired by IBM), LibreDigital (acquired by RRD), Packet Design (acquired by Ciena), Phurnace (acquired by BMC Software), Sipera System (acquired by Avaya, Inc,), StoredIQ (acquired by IBM), Tango Health (acquired by Benefitfocus), and TVA Medical (acquired by Becton Dickinson). He currently serves on the boards of Alkami Technology (NASDAQ: ALKT), Alleviant Medical, Liquibase, Saranas, and VUV Analytics.

Amena has an exceptional track record of scaling high-growth technology businesses in SaaS and enterprise software, including at her two recent CEO roles. She has led successful revenue generation at startups, middle market, and public companies.Amena most recently served as CEO of Airside Mobile, a leader in digital identity verification technology. Previously, Ali was CEO of database monitoring company VividCortex, where she led the company to grow ARR by 80% in 17 months. She has held several senior leadership positions, including at Earth Networks, Softek Storage Solutions (acquired by IBM) and Legato Systems (acquired by EMC). She serves on the board of database DevOps company Liquibase. Amena started her career as a management consultant at Bain & Company. She holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a Bachelor’s Degree from Wesleyan University.Outside of work, Amena enjoys traveling, her family, yoga, and “a good walk spoiled”, aka chasing a small white ball with a long stick on rolling greens.

Todd Barr is the Chief Marketing Officer of Chainlink Labs, the industry-standard Web3 services platform that enables developers to build feature-rich Web3 applications with seamless access to real-world data and off-chain computation across any blockchain.Todd is a high-growth marketing leader, having averaged almost 90% per year revenue growth over the last decade at multiple startups. Previously, Todd was the Chief Marketing Officer at GitLab (GTLB), where he helped grow the company from $30m in ARR to over $200m in ARR in under three years, culminating in a successful IPO in 2021. Todd helped establish the company as the category leader in the DevOps Platform space, while establishing the GitLab brand as the remote work thought leader during the pandemic, with almost 300 media articles in publications like Fast Company, CNBC, CNN, WSJ, Forbes, Fortune, and NPR, along with case studies at HBS and INSEAD. Before GitLab, Todd served as the Vice President of Digital Demand at Red Hat and SVP of Sales and Marketing at Ansible (acquired by Red Hat), growing the business from $1m in ARR to over $25m in ARR in under 4 years and establishing Ansible as a beloved open source tech brand. Prior to Ansible, Todd was the CMO at Alfresco (acquired by Hyland), the open source enterprise content management leader.

Mike has more than 20 years of experience in building and growing successful companies. Most recently, Mike was the Founder and CEO of Waveset Technologies, and identity management software company acquired by Sun Microsystems. At Waveset, Mike received the Austin Under 40 Award for technology and business innovation and was a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.Mike held the position of VP and GM and Tivoli’s $1.2 billion enterprise business unit, which focused on information technology solutions.