Steve Herrod

Stephen Alan Herrod is an American venture capitalist and former CTO of VMware. Raised in Plano, Texas and educated at The University of Texas at Austin and Stanford University, he served as the CTO and SVP of R&D at VMware from 2007 to 2013. He is currently a managing director at the Palo Alto office of General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital and private equity firm.

Early life and education
Herrod was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1971 and grew up in Plano, Texas. He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1992 with a B.A. (special recognition in Computer Science). Subsequently, he received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1998 where his advisor was Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder of VMware. Herrod's Ph.D. dissertation was titled "Using Complete Machine Simulation to Understand Computer System Behavior. While at Stanford, he was part of the FLASH Multiprocessor team.

Early career
Upon graduating from Stanford, he worked on the R10000 MIPS architecture team at SGI. After that, he also co-led the software team at Transmeta through there IPO.

VMware
Herrod joined VMware in 2001 where he ran the virtual machine monitor team, then the ESX Server team, and then the 3000+ person R&D organization.

In 2008, he became the CTO of VMware, chiefly responsible for setting the technology direction of the company and playing a key role in VMware's acquisition and partnership strategies. He was also involved in more than 20 acquisitions, including the Nicira Acquisition in 2012.

General Catalyst Partners
In early 2013, Herrod left VMware to join General Catalyst as a Managing Director.

Awards
In 2009, Steve Herrod was named InfoWorld's CTO of the Year.