John Kim is a Co-founder and Managing Partner of HighBar Partners. Prior to HighBar, Mr. Kim was with W Capital Partners, a private equity fund with over $1 billion under management that makes and acquires direct investments in growth equity technology companies. Mr. Kim joined as the firm’s first employee in 2003. During his time at W Capital, Mr. Kim invested in special situations and secondary direct acquisitions from corporations, financial institutions and general partnerships.

Prior to W Capital, Mr. Kim was Director of Corporate Development at Zeborg (acquired by Emptoris), a venture-backed enterprise software company spun off from The Mitchell Madison Group, where he focused on operations and corporate strategy. He was also Director of Investments at ISL Management, a venture capital firm funded by JPMorgan dedicated to early stage software and financial service investments.

Prior thereto, Mr. Kim was an investment banker with JPMorgan Chase (and its predecessors) and Robertson Stephens, where he worked on complex M&A and leveraged finance transactions across sectors including technology, financial services, healthcare and industrials.

Mr. Kim holds a BS in Economics from The University of Chicago and an MBA, with Honors, from Columbia Business School.

Roy Thiele-Sardiña is a Co-founder and Partner of HighBar Partners. Over the last 25 years, he has founded, invested in and held senior management positions at numerous prominent companies in the technology industry.

Prior to HighBar, Mr. Thiele-Sardiña was a Managing Director with Steelpoint Capital (the private equity subsidiary of Moore Capital Management), an operationally-intensive active investor. At Steelpoint, he crafted the firm’s technology investing strategy and led the firm’s efforts in the storage and security sub-sectors. Prior to Steelpoint, Mr. Thiele-Sardiña was an Executive-In-Residence at the Mayfield Fund.

In the mid-90s, Mr. Thiele-Sardiña channeled his investments through HighBAR Ventures, an investment vehicle that he solely managed. Through this investment vehicle, he co-founded and held key management positions at Ingrian Networks (acquired by SafeNet), a leading data privacy provider, Tasmania Networks (acquired by Cisco), a cache proxy company and Brocade Communications Systems (Nasdaq: BRCD), a fibre channel switch company. As the CEO of Ingrian and Tasmania, Roy was principally responsible for hiring management and developing the companies’ product strategies. As the VP of Sales and Business Development at Brocade, Roy managed the company’s channel strategy and negotiated all of Brocade’s OEM agreements.

Prior to Brocade, Mr. Thiele-Sardiña worked at Sun Microsystems for 11 years. At Sun, he created the company’s telecommunications business and grew it to 10% of Sun’s worldwide revenue. He also led Sun’s international (Asia, Japan, Latin America and EMEA) Sales and Business Development teams. Under Mr. Thiele-Sardiña’s leadership, Sun’s international business grew from $180mm to $1.9bn in less than three years. As a member of Sun’s leadership team, while serving the Office of the Chairman, he was responsible for the company’s Corporate Development effort.

Mr. Thiele-Sardiña holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from The Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University.

Morris Zhang joined HighBar Partners from Gaia Equity, a private equity firm focused on investing in lower middle-market software companies. As an Associate at Gaia Equity, Mr. Zhang focused on investment origination, transaction execution, and due diligence efforts across customer service/experience, supply chain, and process automation sectors.

Mr. Zhang started his career at Horizon Partners, an investment bank in San Francisco. At Horizon, he helped execute on several transactions for technology businesses, totaling $100M+ in deal value, and sourced a number of clients for the firm.

Mr. Zhang holds a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley.

Tom Muise joined HighBar Partners as an Operating Executive focused on financial performance after spending 36 years in an operating and finance rolls across technology.  Prior to joining HighBar, Mr. Muise was Chief Operating Officer at VoiceOps, a coaching enablement solution for call centers; Chief Financial Officer at D2iQ, formerly Mesosphere, and the leading provider of enterprise-grade cloud platforms that enable organizations to embrace open source and cloud native innovations while delivering smarter Day 2 operations; and Chief Financial Officer of Clustrix (now part of MariaDB), which provided the leading scale-out relational database engineered for the cloud or data center.  Tom received his MBA in Accounting and Finance from the University of Michigan and BS in Economics from Bowling Green State University.

Patrick Zelten joined HighBar Partners as an Operating Executive focused on Professional Services after spending 31 years in professional services rolls across technology and consulting.  Mr. Zelten currently serves as SVP, Professional Services and Support for SilkRoad Technology supporting the company’s HR SaaS solutions. Prior to SilkRoad, Mr. Zelten was Senior Director of Forescout Technologies, Vice President, Managed Services and Professional Services for Forsythe Technology, and a Partner at Accenture.  Mr. Zelten received his BBA in Finance from the University of Notre Dame.

Alan Elliot joined HighBar Partners as an Operating Executive focused on Sales & Marketing after spending 20 years sales leadership experience in software start-ups with a focus on Cybersecurity and SaaS.  Prior to joining HighBar, Mr. Elliot served as Chief Revenue Officer for Logz.io, Chief Commercial Officer for SS8, Head of Global Revenue for Janrain, and SVP of Worldwide Sales for PAS. Mr. Elliot received his BBA, with an emphasis in Marketing from Loyola Marymount University.

Tarkan Maner is the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix where he leads global business development and corporate development efforts, with a focus on strategic partnerships, alliances, system integrators, and service providers. Additionally, his responsibilities include leading critical hybrid cloud-focused strategy and product teams including Nutanix’s core virtualization platform (AHV), software-defined networking, and some of the key hybrid cloud services. Before joining Nutanix, he served as Chairman and CEO at Nexenta Systems, Inc., leading the organization from its open-source focus through its acquisition by DataDirect Networks (DDN) in May 2019. Prior to Nexenta, he was the President and CEO at Wyse Technology, one of the virtual desktop computing pioneers acquired by Dell in 2012. He also held executive roles at Dell, CA Technologies, IBM, and Sterling Software. Tarkan serves and served on the boards of several organizations including Teradici, CloudCheckr, Wheels, and leading non-profit organizations in Silicon Valley. Tarkan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering management, an MBA from Midwestern State University and an AMP from Harvard Business School.

Bob Migliorino is a founding partner of W Capital. Bob brings 30 years of experience in operations, management and venture capital having led business operations and turnarounds for several GE businesses and as a founding partner of a leading venture capital fund. Bob has significant industry expertise in the software, internet, digital media and technology services industries.

Prior to the founding of W Capital in 2001, Bob was a founding partner of Canaan Partners, having participated in the management buyout of General Electric’s venture capital arm (GEVENCO) to form Canaan. At Canaan, Bob invested in a range of portfolio companies with a focus in software and technology services. Prior to forming Canaan, Bob spent 15 years with General Electric with operating roles in GE’s Information Services, Industrial and Power Delivery divisions. Bob holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Drexel University.