Lane M. Bess
Principal & Founder
Lane has more than 35 years of experience and a proven track record as an executive for rapidly growing, publicly traded and privately held companies serving the enterprise and consumer markets.
Currently, Lane is the CEO of Deep Instinct and also operates his own Family Fund (Bess Ventures and Advisory, LLC) where he invests to help other firms create their path to positive outcomes.
Throughout his career, Lane has taken his learning experiences from larger corporate environments and tapped into his entrepreneurial spirit to start and build some of the most well-known Internet security companies.
Lane has built numerous multi-billion-dollar companies in internet cyber security with total market capitalization exceeding $100 billion. Lane helped attain early funding and acted as CEO of Palo Alto Networks leading toward its IPO (PANW). He also was instrumental in building Zscaler, an innovator and leader in cloud-based internet security services (ZS). He brought Trend Micro Internet Security to market and helped establish it as global competitor in the 2002-2007 timeframe.
Earlier in his career, Lane held senior sales and marketing positions at NCR Corporation, where he oversaw multinational global sales. At AT&T, Lane was responsible for the product launches of AT&T's business and consumer internet services in the mid-1990s.
Some well-known investments of BV&A include Arista Networks, Nutanix Inc., ThoughtSpot, Rubrik and Zscaler. Lane currently serves on a number of early and mid-stage boards as well as advises and invests in over a dozen companies covering the Internet Cyber Security, Storage, FinTech and Business Intelligence sectors.
Lane has a B.S. Degree in Managerial Economics from Carnegie Mellon University and holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Dayton. Lane also serves as a Trustee on the Board of Carnegie Mellon University.