Pivotal Labs

Rob Mee co-founded Pivotal Labs in 1989. Rob was an early adopter of a highly-disciplined approach to collaborative agile programming methods designed to address the constant state of change of today’s software projects while ensuring product quality, rapid time to market and reduced execution risk.

As Pivotal's President, Rob has grown the company into a major provider of software development services for a wide range of companies from seed stage startups to large enterprise companies. Today Pivotal is known for its deep technical consulting expertise in consumer web and mobile application development and enterprise automation, and for Pivotal Tracker, its agile project management software. Rob oversaw Pivotal Labs’ acquisition by EMC Corporation in March 2012, and continues to lead and guide the vision for Pivotal Labs, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of EMC.

Rob began his software career in an artificial intelligence laboratory in Tokyo, writing natural language translation systems in Lisp. His early interest in languages, both natural and artificial, led him to follow the evolution of software engineering into object oriented systems and databases, Smalltalk development, and agile methodologies.

Rob graduated from the University of California at Berkeley.

Rob's Blog

Christian Sepulveda is Vice President of Corporate Development at Pivotal Labs, a role that includes strategic planning, modeling and execution of the company’s vision. He is responsible for negotiating and finalizing all contracts within Pivotal, and has played a key role in M&A deals such as EMC’s acquisition of Pivotal in March 2012. In this position he is involved in establishing new regional offices, new service offerings and new corporate partnerships, among other corporate endeavors.

Prior to joining Pivotal in 2006, Christian was Vice President of Engineering of Nominum, a provider of industry-leading network naming and addressing solutions, from 2003-2005. Previously, Christian was co-founder of a small consulting and software development firm in New York. He has worked in diverse industries, from finance to fashion, on both commercial software and internal IT applications.

Christian holds a BA degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Christian's Blog

Dan Podsedly manages Pivotal Tracker, Pivotal Labs’ award winning project management and collaboration software.

Dan has been building large applications since the Smalltalk era, and has been a practitioner and coach of agile programming methods since the earliest days of Extreme Programming. He has led projects in a variety of industries, built a consulting practice from the ground up, and was instrumental in the successful adoption of agile methods at some of the world's largest e-commerce companies.

Dan joined Pivotal in 2004 as Principal, and spent the next four years leading Pivotal’s largest client engagements. In 2008, Dan led the public launch of Pivotal Tracker, originally developed as an internal tool to help Pivotal developers improve their efficiency, and has grown the product into what it is today - a popular, well known force of agile transformation in the software industry used by hundreds of thousands of developers.

Dan's Blog

As Vice President of Product, Drew McManus leads Pivotal Labs’ design and product management practice, providing clients with enhanced integration across all aspects of the software development process. Drew joined Pivotal in 2012 after founding and managing Road 3, a consultancy dedicated to helping companies turn ideas into successful products. After a long and successful strategic partnership with Pivotal, Drew joined the company to spearhead the expansion of Pivotal’s service offering.

Drew has worked with many startups and Fortune 100 companies over the years as an entrepreneur, advisor and senior leader. He co-founded Bring Light, a web service to help nonprofits reach new donors and raise funds online, which was acquired by Rally.org. He was with Adobe Systems for 12 years serving in various senior management roles, including corporate product management. Earlier in his career he worked at Apple Computer, and its software subsidiary Claris Corporation (now Filemaker, Inc). He has taken many products from concept to completion, including the launch of Adobe’s first consumer digital imaging product, which became the number one selling product in its category and earned Drew the Software Publishers Association’s Codie Award. Drew was featured in the book “We Are the New Radicals: A Manifesto for Re-inventing Yourself and Saving the World,” by Julia Moulden.

As Chief Operating Officer, Edward Hieatt oversees all operational aspects of Pivotal Labs’ consulting business including engineering, client services and the company’s open source product strategy. In this role, he drives revenue growth and performance, and is responsible for managing all regional offices across the US and overseas.

Edward ensures that Pivotal’s development teams identify, anticipate and exceed client expectations for their products. His engineering organization is acclaimed for delivering rapid, high-quality, sustainable, iterative development services.

With experience as a software developer and an engineering leader responsible for delivering web and mobile applications as well as large-scale enterprise infrastructure projects, Edward brings deep insights to the COO position. After joining Pivotal as Principal in 2003, Edward was responsible for leading dozens of client engagements, and was instrumental in defining Pivotal’s development process and methodologies. Edward was promoted to Vice President, Engineering in 2008, and subsequently oversaw Pivotal's expansion into the New York and Boulder, CO, markets. Edward was also a key contributor to the development of Pivotal Tracker, the agile project management and collaboration tool used by thousands of software developers worldwide.

Edward holds a degree in Mathematics from Oxford University, England.

Edward's Blog

As Vice President of Engineering of Pivotal Labs’ East Coast region, Josh Knowles is responsible for engineering and client engagements in Pivotal’s New York and Boston offices where the company’s local clients work closely with Pivotal to deliver software applications using highly disciplined agile development processes.

Josh joined Pivotal in 2010 as the Managing Director of the New York office, and was promoted to Vice President in 2012. Prior to Pivotal Josh has been an accomplished software developer, trainer and consultant for a variety of start up and enterprise organizations. Most recently he was the Director of Engineering for Gilt Groupe, one of the fastest growing start ups in New York City.

In addition to his work at Pivotal, Josh is active in the Ruby community as the co-organizer of the nyc.rb, one of the longest running Ruby Users Groups in the US, as well as the lead organizer of the Gotham Ruby Conference.

Matt Eng joined Pivotal Labs in April 2012 as the Chief Financial Officer after the company was acquired by EMC Corp in March. In this role he oversees the global Finance operations for Pivotal and has responsibility for the company's financial reporting, balance sheet management and planning. In addition to these responsibilities Matt plays a lead role in business process governance and alignment with EMC, enabling Pivotal to continue operating as a separate company.

Previously, Matt spent nearly 12 years of his career with EMC in various senior financial roles, including director of business operations, director of finance at RSA, the security division of EMC, and controller for EMC Managed Services. Prior to EMC, Matt worked at Bain & Company. Earlier in his career he held posts at Boston Scientific and Raytheon.

Matt received his BS in Finance at Babson College and his MBA in Finance at Elkin B. McCallum graduate School of Business at Bentley College.

As Pivotal Labs’ Vice President of Marketing, Melissa leads the team responsible for building the Pivotal brand, promoting the company's vision, and developing the strategy for creating market awareness and increasing revenue for Pivotal's service, product, and open source offerings. Melissa brings deep business-to-business and consumer marketing and brand-building expertise to Pivotal from her extensive experience as a senior marketing executive, successful entrepreneur, and board-level advisor in Silicon Valley.

Melissa was Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Communications at Adobe Systems, where she established Adobe as one of the world’s most recognized technology and consumer brands. She was a member of the executive team responsible for growing the company from $700M to almost $3B. In addition to leading Adobe’s global marketing organization, Melissa was also responsible for Adobe’s $350M Education business as well as the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility efforts.

Melissa co-founded Bring Light, Inc., a social fundraising platform that was acquired by Rally.org. Previously, Melissa held senior marketing roles at Claris Corporation, a subsidiary of Apple Computer (now Filemaker, Inc) and Hewlett-Packard. Melissa was also a principal at Korora Partners, and an Executive in Residence at San Jose State University's Lucas Graduate School of Business.

Melissa is a board member and advisor to a number of private companies including Nero AG, Resource Interactive, Rally and Dyansys.