Welcome to 5 New Mentors: Cassie Lancellotti-Young, J Ram, David Birnbaum, George Brandman, and Kiran Narsu

Like we’ve said before, mentors at Work-Bench are part of the heart and soul of everything we do. Given the unique set of procurement, sales, and pricing challenges enterprise startups face, we’ve seen time and time again how valuable it can be to hear the buyer’s perspective or have a voice on the other side of the table, especially when all it takes is one contract to make or break an early stage enterprise startup.

From leading Fortune 1000 executives to enterprise entrepreneurs with hundred million dollar exits, we’re lucky to work with such great advisors to our portfolio companies. See the full list of mentors in our Work-Bench network, and join us in welcoming five new mentors to our Work-Bench family: Cassie Lancellotti-Young, J Ram, David Birnbaum, George Brandman, and Kiran Narsu.

Cassie Lancellotti-Young
Executive Vice President, Customer Success & Client Services at Sailthru

Cassie is EVP Customer Success at Sailthru, where she works with top media and retail brands to strengthen customer retention with multi-channel personalization and predictive analytics. Formerly a Sailthru client and a long-time consumer marketer, Cassie joined Sailthru from Gerson Lehrman Group where as VP Marketing Analytics & Intelligence, she led GLG’s intrapreneurship efforts and evangelized lean development across the organization. Prior to GLG, she served as VP Marketing for Savored (acquired by Groupon in 2012).

Previously, Cassie was an early employee at TheLadders.com, where she spent several years managing direct marketing and analytics for the company’s subscription business. She began her career as a media and technology analyst at Citigroup Global Corporate & Investment Bank and has also held a variety of consulting roles with leading digital brands such as AOL and SapientNitro. Cassie graduated from Duke University and holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

J Ram
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

Ram was in charge of Cloud Platform at Goldman Sachs for years, and was central to building Goldman’s very advanced constraints based orchestration system. He was instrumental in developing an Application Modelling Framework that enabled faster adoption of technologies like public cloud and containers securely. At this point, 95% of all applications in Goldman Sachs is run on this platform.

Prior to Goldman Sachs, in Morgan Stanley, he designed and engineered the Aurora Computing platform. He was key in the redesign of the all aspects of Morgan Stanley infrastructure (Compute, Network, Storage, Security, etc)

David Birnbaum
Former Global Head of Enterprise Computing Engineering at Morgan Stanley

David Birnbaum is a technologist and senior manager who has provided architectural, strategic, and operational expertise to a wide range of organizations and industries. Most recently he was the Global Head of Enterprise Computing Engineering for Morgan Stanley, where he ran software development and engineering. Prior to that role he ran the Architecture Practice in the Office of the CTO for Enterprise Infrastructure and served as the initial Program Manager for the infrastructure technology migration of the Smith Barney acquisition, the largest merger on Wall Street at the time.

Before his role at Morgan Stanley, David ran PINS, a New York-based voice and data carrier which focused on the SME and not-for-profit market. As president, he installed the first datacenter cogeneration system in New York City and successfully transitioned the company from a traditional long-distance provider to a fully regulated CLEC with extensive VoIP and data capabilities before selling the company to a larger CLEC.

In his spare time, David is the Managing Member of The Food Cycle — a brewery (Kent Falls Brewing), distillery (Neversink Spirits) and farm (Camps Road Farm) which distributes delicious products in New York and Connecticut.

George Brandman
Senior Managing Director at GE Capital

George Brandman is a senior enterprise IT and data leader with extensive experience driving organizational change and delivering software systems, infrastructure and data solutions for top-tier firms including Morgan Stanley and GE Capital. He has created and led global development and engineering teams with extensive experience in strategic planning, recruiting, management, coaching and building high-performance teams. George delivers high impact, cost-effective solutions across Capital Markets with a recent focus on data architecture, Dodd-Frank, SIFI compliance and Risk.

Kiran Narsu
Senior Vice President of Enterprise Sales at Digital Reasoning

Kiran leads sales across all industry verticals at Work-Bench alumnus Digital Reasoning, where he is driving DR’s efforts to bring its cognitive computing solutions to leading investment banks. Kiran has close to 20 years building successful financial services software businesses. He loves to build new markets and launch new products; he revels in the details of solution messaging, building and scaling sales capacity and execution and leading high-performance, collaborative sales teams. Prior to Digital Reasoning, Kiran worked at Pegasystems and spent a decade building i-flex’s global risk and compliance analytics business, which was later acquired by Oracle. Kiran is active in the Work-Bench community and is also participating in the #HackTheNetwork initiative, whose aim is to increase diversity in enterprise technology.

Are you interested in becoming a Work-Bench mentor? Let us know here, and make sure to check out our full roster of Work-Bench mentors.