Chairman
Lane Bess is the Principal and Founder of Bess Ventures and Advisory.
He has spent over 30 years as an operational executive and has successfully launched start-ups and grown medium-sized businesses to large scale.
Between 2008 and 2011, Lane Bess was CEO of Palo Alto Networks where he led the late fundraising, and scaled the company from its early go-to-market to a revenue run rate exceeding $200 million on path to its IPO. Prior to Palo Alto Networks, he served as the EVP of Worldwide Sales and General Manager of publicly traded Trend Micro Inc. (Nikkei) – growing worldwide revenues to over $1 billion annually.
Lane Bess has extensive experience in building technology businesses in Europe, Asia Pacific, and Japan as well as other international regions. His considerable work in the security technology sector has made him a trusted advisor for many enterprise CIOs and CISOs.
With core strengths in Sales, Marketing and Product Management, Lane Bess has deep expertise in driving high growth for network/cloud security, computing, and software companies. His business experience includes providing critical technology solutions to Fortune 2000 companies, large enterprises, mid-size businesses, as well as consumer markets. Through continuous leverage of distribution channels, Lane Bess has been consistently recognized as a leading “channel friendly” executive.
During Lane’s career he has also held senior Sales and Marketing roles at NCR Corporation and AT&T. During his time at NCR, he oversaw Multinational Corporation sales and managed large global sales divisions. At AT&T, Lane was responsible for the product launches of AT&T’s Business and Consumer Internet services in the mid 90s.
Lane Bess holds a B.S. Degree in Managerial Economics from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and a Masters Degree from University of Dayton (UD).
He was recognized as an astronaut by the Federal Aviation Administration. Due to completion of a program granting ‘Commercial Space Astronaut Wings’ and flown into space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard space capsule. Bess brought a Sepio branded rubber ducky on the flight with him as a vote of confidence in the company and to acknowledge his new role as Chairman.
