Leadership Team

Doron Grinstein

Doron Grinstein

Co-Founder and CEO

Doron is a prolific inventor, successful software founder/CEO, chief architect, and an adventure seeker with extensive cloud-native, massively scalable software accomplishments. In the 2000s, Doron was a technologist at Disney working on FASTPASS and many other exciting projects.

While at the happiest place on earth, one of his inventions was a technology called "Keystone" - a fine-grained authorization service adopted enterprise-wide. After seeing Keystone's success, Doron spun out the IP under BiTKOO, a company he founded in partnership with Disney. BiTKOO saw rapid growth until its acquisition by Quest Software in 2011.

After Dell acquired Quest Software, Doron held a Chief Software Architect role at Dell for three years. He then joined Concur as Principal Architect and continued in this role at SAP after it acquired Concur. He later joined VMWare as Chief Software Architect of its Cloud Services Platform. Throughout these industry-leading companies, Doron has gained insight, deep expertise, and a knack for making the lives of software developers easier and better.

Dan Wilson

Dan Wilson

Co-Founder and CTO

Dan has served as CTO of Control Plane since October of 2019. Dan has over 20 years of experience working on cloud services in contributor and leadership roles across operations, engineering, and architecture. While working at SAP Concur, he scaled their SaaS offering to millions of users and directed their shift to cloud architecture.

Dan's passion is building tools to help engineering teams leverage cloud-native solutions with ease yet sustain power and flexibility. Dan is an open-source software advocate with contributions to Kubernetes, Istio, Knative, and more. He inspires teams to focus on powerful but simple architectures, end-to-end security, and failure mitigation.

Thomas Stewart

Thomas Stewart

Chairman, Co-Founder and CFO

Thomas is a finance and management veteran with extensive experience in high-growth SaaS/Cloud business models. He has a track record in capital formation and executive leadership for companies from seed to growth stage, working with angels, venture capital, and private equity.

Mr. Stewart comes most recently from an exit at SecureAuth, an innovator in secure access control. As a strategic executive, CFO, and board member of the Company, Tom was responsible for capitalizing the company (raising over $20M) from shortly after inception and then steering it from zero revenue to $40M in recurring revenue and an exit of over $200M.

Mr. Stewart previously held executive positions in finance and marketing at Intel Corporation and Intel Capital.

Julian Vassev

Julian Vassev

Chief Software Architect

Julian has over ten years of experience in cloud engineering and virtualization. Before joining Control Plane, he spent a decade at VMWare, where he was instrumental in a broad set of cloud initiatives. Julian has led multiple integration and compliance projects, gaining deep expertise in cloud-native systems and running them at scale. He was an early adopter of Kubernetes, and he enjoys designing unbreakable systems and delighting users. Julian started his career in software architecture designing retail FOREX trading systems. He enjoys the outdoors, invention, and travel to exotic places.

Edward Treska

Edward Treska

General Counsel

Edward Treska has served as General Counsel for Control Plane since May 2020. Ed brings more than 20 years of experience as a public company general counsel. He managed all aspects of corporate legal departments with a heavy emphasis on intellectual property licensing and litigation. Before joining Control Plane, Ed practiced as an IP and general corporate consultant for serveral technology startup companies.

From 2004 to late 2018, Ed served a primary role in developing the corporate structure and licensing business of Acacia Research Corporation, most recently as Executive Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary. Acacia Research Corporation was a pioneer in patent procurement and licensing to many of the world’s leading technology and medical device companies. Before his long tenure at Acacia, Ed was General Counsel at SRS Labs from 1996-2004, a publicly-traded audio technology company bought by DTS.

Ed began his legal career in 1992 at the law firm of Knobbe Martens. He holds a Juris Doctor from the University of San Diego School of Law and an Electrical Engineering degree from Colorado State University.

Taylor Stafford-Smith

Taylor Stafford-Smith

Director of Customer Success and Special Programs

Taylor joined Control Plane in March 2021. Before joining the company, Taylor co-founded a technology company helping organizations automate their tasks. She interacted with hundreds of customers, gaining a knack to ensure projects' success and put the customer first. She enjoys learning to code and helping onboard customers to the Control Plane platform, and seeing them succeed. Taylor received her BA in Mathematics at Bates College.

Hakan Karaduman

Hakan Karaduman

Director of Software Engineering

Hakan joined Control Plane in April 2020. He oversees software development and manages the CLI and UX teams. Hakan is from Turkey; having started his career as an indie game developer, he published multiple mobile games and VR experiences. Hakan is a constant learner who mastered web and game development. He constantly tinkers with new tech, figuring ways to make it even more efficient and reliable. He enjoys a wide array of topics, including space, football, and reading.

Eric Kotler

Eric Kotler

Director of Customer Success

Eric earned his MS degree in computer science from USC. He is passionate about software quality. For the past 20 years, Eric worked as an expert software developer and architect. Before joining Control Plane, Eric spent ten years as a product architect at Dell Software. Before that, he was the CTO and principal engineer at BiTKOO, the leader in fine-grained authorization software. He is an avid reader, private pilot and enjoys inventing and discovering new technologies.

Kyle Cupp

Kyle Cupp

Director of Technology

Kyle is a software architect who spent a decade in the health and wellness, headless e-commerce, and SaaS spaces before joining Control Plane. A proven leader with a passion for elegant, modular, and scalable solutions, Kyle has helped his teams complete several daunting projects over the years.

While working at Sharper Image Kyle invented “Kissinger”, a microservice chassis framework, and “Tachyon”, an e-commerce platform built using Kissinger. Over a five month span, Kyle and his team built Tachyon and used it to replace Oracle ATG. Throughout his career and during this project especially, Kyle developed a love for cloud native technology, which he carried with him to Control Plane in January of 2022.

Kyle’s favorite piece of software is the one that makes the lives of other developers easier, which made the opportunity to work with the team at Control Plane a dream come true. When he’s not working, Kyle enjoys writing, reading, playing video games, and wrestling with his three boys.