Arash Afrakhteh

Arash has been an entrepreneur for more than two decades with experience spanning three startups and big tech like Cisco, Apple and Microsoft. After being an early employee and engineering leader at two startups, he co-founded Cariden Technologies, a pioneer in infrastructure SDN and bootstrapped it for 11 years to a majority market share before its acquisition by Cisco.

He has built and led two engineering teams from ground up, releasing many products, defined technical direction as CTO, worked on product management, sales, customer success, partnerships, and BD. He also cleaned the windows, or anything else that got in the way of having clear vision!

At Pear, Arash is focused on enterprise and B2B startups with sub focus on AI/ML, Cloud and datacenter, data infrastructures and SDx with x being various aspects of infrastructure.

He loves working with founders from day one, getting into trenches with them and collaborating on various aspects of company building, from figuring out early and later stage PMF to engineering and processes, software and architecture, hiring and culture, enterprise sales, product management, GTM and fundraising. He believes having a large impact requires building exceptional teams and a strong culture and a leader's impact starts with their team.

Outside of work he likes to travel, play in theatre, train for triathlons and use any feasible method of coming down mountains fast with his son, be it on ski, skateboard, mountain or road bike.