Meet Our Nitro Family

Founder & CEO

Sam started his first company at 16, while still in high school, and his second at 21, while attending university. After founding Nitro with several friends in Melbourne in 2005, the once-tiny startup has gone on to become a Silicon Valley success story. Today, Sam leads a team of over 200 Nitronauts across the US, Australia, Europe and Asia, and every month, millions of people in nearly 200 countries use Nitro products.

Sam was the Ernst and Young Australian Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year for 2014. He's on a permanent leave of absence from Melbourne's RMIT University, where he studied business, after moving to San Francisco to establish Nitro's global headquarters. On the weekends, depending on the weather and the season, you’ll typically find him motorcycling, cycling or skiing.

Executive Chairman

Kurt has more than 24 years of management experience, including public and private company leadership, initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, strategic investments, recapitalizations and venture stage investing.

Previously, Kurt was president and CEO of Fastclick (NASDAQ: FSTC). Under his leadership, the company tripled revenue to $85 million, completed a $75 million private placement offering and a $78 million IPO. Kurt then orchestrated the sale of Fastclick to ValueClick in September 2005, achieving a $285 million valuation. Before joining Fastclick, Kurt was CFO of ValueClick (NASDAQ: VCLK) and was instrumental in the company's growth from an early-stage enterprise to a $500 million international media technology company. Before ValueClick, Kurt was an investment banker with Olympic Capital Partners in Seattle.

Chief Financial Officer

Ana Sirbu joined us from BlueVine, where she served as Chief Financial Officer for over four years. She played a critical role in BlueVine’s growth and success, spearheading their capital markets strategy and leading them through three funding rounds that raised over $800 million in debt and equity financing. Prior to BlueVine, Ana was a technology investor at Capital G, Google’s growth investing arm, and at Silver Lake Partners.

Ana was named one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology in 2020 and was recognized by the Women in Fintech Powerlist in 2017. In 2015, Ana was recognized as one of Growth Cap’s 40 Under 40 top growth technology investors. She is a bold, growth-oriented leader, and passionate about building lasting businesses that help millions of customers and contribute to the community. Ana holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Harvard.

COO

Part of the Nitro team as COO since 2008, Gina has global responsibility for the Business Operations, Marketing, and People functions, including Employee Experience and Talent. With over 15 years of software industry experience, Gina seeks to attract, retain, and cultivate the best talent at Nitro. In order to accomplish this goal, she is passionate about developing a creative, challenging, fun, diverse, and inspiring work environment that makes every Nitronaut feel that his or her contribution helps grow the business. Prior to Nitro, Gina oversaw global sales and marketing at activePDF, a leading provider of server-side PDF solutions and developer tools.

Fluent in French, Gina holds an MBA from the University of Phoenix as well as a BA International Marketing & Languages from Dublin City University, Ireland. In her spare time, Gina loves good food and wine, keeping fit, travel, and plenty of California sunshine.

Chief Marketing Officer

As Nitro's first-ever Chief Marketing Officer, Maria Robinson will be driving growth and awareness of Nitro around the globe. Maria joins us from Imperva, where she served as Vice President of Growth Strategy. In this role, Maria was responsible for Marketing and SDR organizations leading brand, digital, demand, web, and ABM transformation, and transition to SaaS. She also founded the Imperva Women's Network to help foster greater diversity and inclusion in technology. Prior to joining Imperva, Maria held various leadership roles in high growth divisions at Intuit, LogMeIn, and Citrix as well as healthcare technology startups.

Maria earned her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Global Studies from Alverno College. She has spent time around the world living in New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Italy, before coming back to San Francisco where she pursues her personal passions as a yogi, a foodie, and a proud mother of two great kids.

Chief Product Officer

Sam Thorpe joins us from Flow Kana, where he served as CPO, responsible for formulating Flow Kana's technology and data strategy to accelerate the responsiveness of all supply chain tiers. Prior to Flow Kana, Sam served as the Director of Product Strategy at Nitro, where he led strategy, customer research and innovation toward synthesizing and unifying Nitro's global product strategy, and played a key role in the fund raising of tens of millions of investment dollars.

Sam also previously built and led innovative, high-performance product organizations in start-up environments, including two different enterprise real estate systems that were acquired in succession by Fortune 500 companies. Sam holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a Business minor from Humboldt State University.

SVP, Global Sales

Mark joined Nitro in January 2020 as Vice President EMEA, and now serves as Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, where he oversees all of Nitro’s global Sales, Customer and Revenue Operations. Mark is an accomplished executive with a proven track record of driving high performance and business transformation through focused execution, often in challenging and highly competitive market segments.

Prior to Nitro, Mark was a member of Marketo’s senior leadership team in EMEA responsible for accelerated growth across the region. He also served as Executive Vice President at Vistatec, a global professional services organization, where he headed up global sales, marketing & strategy. Mark has also held number of senior sales and marketing leadership positions in organisations such as PFH, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) & Hewlett Packard.

Mark holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree (Marketing major) and a Postgraduate Higher Diploma in Marketing Practice from the National University of Ireland, Galway.

VP, Engineering

As Nitro’s Vice President of Engineering, David oversees the global engineering team across Dublin and San Francisco, as well as all Nitro products. With over 30 years of experience developing, coaching, and leading engineering organizations, David’s diverse experience in software development ranges from online poker to online fashion retail and now includes document productivity.

Guided by the belief that traditional management techniques can hinder intelligent, creative employees, David studied human motivation within technology organizations while completing his Master’s degree in Work and Organizational Behavior. At Nitro, he’s committed to creating a cutting-edge work environment that benefits both customers and Nitronauts alike.

On most weekends, you’ll find David on the golf course, indulging (and occasionally swearing at) his newfound love for the game.

VP, Business Ops & Strategy

With over two decades of B2B and B2C experience in client and agency leadership roles, Eric has worked with startups and global enterprises alike, including AAA, Visa, Symantec, Dole, and Nestle. Prior to Nitro, Eric was the Senior Director, Global Product Marketing at LiveOps, where he successfully launched a wide variety of new cloud products and customer-service applications.

An avid lover of travel and wine, Eric spends much of his free time in Sonoma, where he enjoys sipping pinot noir and playing with his two French bulldogs, Timo and Juno.

VP, Customer Experience

As VP of Customer Experience, Jennifer is passionate about engraining our customer-centric culture into every facet of Nitro. Jennifer joined Nitro in 2016 to create the Customer Success function, and now oversees the end-to-end customer experience, including Customer Success, Solutions Engineering and Customer Support. With over 15 years of experience leading Customer Success and Customer Insights teams at organizations including C3 IoT, Zynga, and eBay, Jennifer is committed to ensuring our customers have a positive experience at every stage of their Nitro journey.

Born-and-raised in California, Jennifer spends as much of her free time as possible at the beach and is happiest when she has sand between her toes. Off-season, she enjoys hiking, skiing, travel, sporting events, and working her way through the Napa Valley wineries.

VP, Product

As VP of Product at Nitro, Kevin leads the Product Management team and is responsible for product strategy, roadmap creation and go-to-market delivery. Kevin is a proponent of design-led innovation and leads teams to solve problems at-scale for the benefit of Nitro's global customer base.

Kevin has over 18 years’ experience in technology innovation, strategic leadership and delivering scalable, global solutions. Prior to Nitro, Kevin worked for Microsoft in Dublin and Seattle. He led teams to create enterprise-grade products and services for the globalization and localization of Windows software.

Kevin holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from University College Dublin. In his spare time, Kevin enjoys day-tripping around Ireland with his wife and two young daughters.

VP, Design & User Experience

As Nitro’s Vice President of Design & User Experience, Peter is responsible for how Nitro is experienced across all of its properties. From the moment someone discovers Nitro to their daily interaction with our products, his goal is to create endearing experiences that transform the way we work. With over a decade of product design, his work has reached millions of users across a wide range of industries. Influenced in part by his time as the co-founder of an award-winning video game company, he believes that any task can be made intuitive, engaging, and fun.

After several years in San Francisco, Peter lives on a historic homestead in New Hampshire with his wife and son along with a dog, a cat, some chickens, and several thousand honey bees. On the weekends, you’ll find him outside tending to the farm, making maple syrup, or in his woodshop.

VP Sales, North America

As VP of Sales for North America, Barry is responsible for leading Nitro’s revenue growth across the Americas region. His primary focus is the Mid-Market and Enterprise segments, where he’s helping Nitro win Fortune 500 logos at enterprise scale across tens of thousands of knowledge workers. Prior to Nitro, he led large enterprise sales teams at Oracle, IBM, and CA Technologies (now Broadcom), mostly in the technology infrastructure space. Whether it was on-premise, SaaS/IaaS, or a hybrid cloud approach to IT delivery, Barry and his teams worked with the office of the CIO to deploy cost-effective IT solutions to their internal and external customers. Dedicated to a customer-centric approach to sales, Barry balances high revenue-growth expectations with customer goals and objectives.

Barry holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Notre Dame, as well as a Master of Science in Computer Information Systems from Northwestern University. With dual U.S. and Luxembourg citizenship, he aspires to learn French to keep pace with his wife (who is already fluent) and two daughters (who are learning faster than their father).

VP Sales, APAC

As VP of Sales, APAC, Michael focuses on driving Nitro’s revenue growth across the Asia-Pacific region. With 20 years of sales leadership experience at organizations like EMC, Fuji Xerox, and Viatek, he has extensive expertise in document workflow and digital transformation solutions. Michael brings a consultative style to management, helping team members uncover their full potential by inspiring, coaching, and challenging them to achieve their professional goals.

A family man and avid wine lover, Michael has an affinity for pinot noir and enjoys spending his spare time with his wife and two young daughters.