Decibel Partners

Alessio Fanelli is a partner at Decibel who works with technical founders building tools for technical users, advising on product design, go-to-market strategy, and technical recruiting. He was previously a Principal at 645 Ventures, focusing on dev tools, security, and enterprise SaaS. Earlier he founded Smart Torvy, an open source and hardware home automation platform, and worked as a lead engineer at early-stage startups including Welcome Tech; he co-hosts the Latent Space podcast on AI.

Dan Nguyen-Huu is a partner at Decibel who works with founders building ML/AI, cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity companies. He was previously a Vice President at Battery Ventures and earlier worked at VMware and in UBS's technology investment banking group. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Venture Capital in 2019.

Jon Sakoda is an entrepreneur-turned-VC whose IMlogic Symantec exit gives him founder, product and cybersecurity expertise; he hosts The Decibel Podcast and built a Founders Helping Founders community for founders.

Stacey Wueste is the Business Development Partner at Decibel, where she supports portfolio startups with customer discovery, go-to-market strategy, and early enterprise traction, focusing on the cybersecurity and AI ecosystems. Prior to Decibel, she held executive roles at HP, including leading worldwide channel partner development for its commercial and enterprise sales channel, serving as chief of staff for the global commercial sales organization, and heading sales and marketing for its North America notebook and handheld operations. She is a Stanford graduate.

Amy Chang is a Founder Advisor at Decibel. She founded Accompany, a relationship intelligence platform for professionals serving Fortune 500 financial and professional services clients, which was acquired by Cisco, after which she served as EVP leading Cisco's Collaboration business. Earlier she led Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, Trends, and multichannel attribution teams at Google for over seven years, led product for paid search and affiliates at eBay, worked at McKinsey, and began her career at Intel, AMD, and Motorola. She holds a BS and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Andrew Peterson is a founder, board member, advisor, and investor focused on information security. He co-founded and served as CEO of Signal Sciences, a website/mobile app/API security platform that was acquired by Fastly for $825M, and previously built product and sales teams at companies including Etsy, Google, and the Clinton Foundation. He authored the O'Reilly book "Cracking Security Misconceptions" and holds a BA in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University.

Bhaskar Sunkara is a Founder Advisor at Decibel. He was the founding CTO of AppDynamics, which Cisco acquired for $3.7 billion, where he led product management and engineering. Earlier in his career he worked as a software engineer at Wily Technology and, following its acquisition, at CA. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Madras University.

Dug Song is a Founder Advisor at Decibel. He co-founded and served as CEO of Duo Security, which was acquired by Cisco for $2.35 billion in 2018. Before Duo, he spent seven years as founding Chief Security Architect at Arbor Networks and built an early commercial network anomaly detection system that was acquired by Check Point Software Technologies. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Michigan.

François Dufour is a strategic CMO focused on B2B and B2D marketing and go-to-market strategy, helping technical founders reach product-market fit and grow. He was CMO in Residence and Marketing Partner at Decibel from 2021 to 2024, and has held marketing leadership and advisory roles at companies including Twilio, Udacity, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, Algolia, Apollo GraphQL, Camunda, and Vercel. He currently serves as fractional CMO at Augment Code, co-founded Product-led Leaders, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Jon Oberheide is a Founder Advisor at Decibel and co-founder and CTO of Duo Security, where he oversees product vision, security, and the Duo Labs research team. Duo Security was acquired by Cisco for $2.35 billion in 2018. He works in security research with expertise in mobile and cloud security and malware analysis, and holds bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Lauren Ipsen is the Talent Partner at Decibel, where she helps technical founders recruit early-stage product and engineering talent. She previously worked as an executive recruiter at Daversa Partners, serving high-growth startups including Airbnb, Canva, Discord, Snap, and Twitter, and most recently was a talent partner at General Catalyst focused on seed-stage companies. Her career began in broadcast journalism.

Mallik Mahalingam is a Founder Advisor at Decibel. He co-founded Springpath Inc., serving as its CEO and CTO until the company was acquired by Cisco in 2017, and now works as a Cisco Distinguished Engineer and CTO of the HyperFlex product line. Before Springpath, he was a Principal Engineer at VMware leading networking and storage product development, and he holds close to 80 patents and has authored six academic papers. He is a graduate of the University of Madras.

Marty Roesch is a Founder Advisor at Decibel. He founded Sourcefire, where he served as CEO/CTO until its acquisition by Cisco, after which he led the Security Business Group as chief architect. He is the original author and lead developer of the Snort Intrusion Detection and Prevention System and holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Clarkson University.

Mohit Lad is Co-Founder and CEO of ThousandEyes, an internet and cloud intelligence platform that was acquired by Cisco in August 2020. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA, where he researched large-scale network diagnostics, and previously worked at Nokia building a system to monitor mobile services performance. He has served on the Program Committee of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) from 2009 to 2013.

Omar Tawakol is a Founder Advisor at Decibel and serves as Vice President & General Manager of the Cisco Contact Center business unit, where he oversees its strategy and portfolio. He previously co-founded and led Voicea, a voice-based AI assistant platform, as CEO until its 2019 acquisition by Cisco, and earlier founded and led BlueKai, a consumer data marketplace and management platform acquired by Oracle in 2014, after which he served as Senior VP & GM of the Oracle Data Cloud unit. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University and a BS from MIT.

Ricardo Oliveira is Co-Founder and CTO of ThousandEyes, which Cisco acquired in August 2020, where he leads technical strategy and innovation. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA, where his research included Cyclops, a platform for detecting attacks on Internet routing infrastructure, and he has published widely and is lead author on several patents from work at AT&T Labs, Thomson, and Juniper Networks. He has more than 10 years of experience in computer networking.

Stacey Ernest works in finance and accounting within the alternative asset space, covering both in-house and fund administration roles across more than a decade. At Decibel, she handles fund and firm financial operations, compliance, and LP relations. She previously served as VP of Finance at Electric Capital, a crypto-focused venture firm, and holds a BA in Business Economics from UC Santa Barbara and an MBA in Finance from Saint Mary's College of California, along with an active California CPA license.

Tanya Dargel is the Administrative Partner at Decibel Partners, focusing on organization and operational support for the firm. Her prior roles across various industries centered on building internal and external partnerships with clients and businesses. She holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia.