CEOI MEMBER SINCE 2018

Charles Giancarlo, the chairman and CEO of Pure Storage, has a 40-year history of innovation in leading technology firms. Before Pure Storage, he was managing director at Silver Lake Partners (2008–13), the world’s largest technology investor, where he was also head of the Value Creation team working to improve the operations of the firm’s portfolio companies and management teams. He co-led Silver Lake’s acquisition of Skype and served as its executive chairman until its sale to Microsoft. Mr. Giancarlo also acted as interim CEO at Avaya. Earlier, he was second in command at Cisco Systems, joining in 1994 after Cisco acquired Kalpana Networks, where he was chief product officer. At Cisco, he held multiple positions, culminating as executive vice president, CTO, and chief development officer. He led all of Cisco’s product development, product management, and product and market strategy, as well as more than 30,000 employees and some $40 billion of product sales. Currently, Mr. Giancarlo serves on the boards of Arista Networks and Zscaler and is a trustee for Brown University. He also advises the UC Berkeley School of Engineering. Previously, he was a board member at Accenture, Netflix, ServiceNow, Avaya, and Imperva. Mr. Giancarlo holds a BS degree in engineering from Brown University, an MS degree in electrical engineering from the UC Berkeley, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.