Leadership

Prior to founding Blue Lake, Rene was Vice President of North America Sales for a number of technology companies and spent over 30 years in hardware and software sales. He started his career in the minicomputer industry joining Prime Computer as a sales rep in Portland, Oregon, and through multiple promotions eventually ran the large Los Angeles branch.

He left after 10 years to build the Los Angeles district for Sequent Computer Systems, the leader in high end parallel processing systems, a new generation of computers that were replacing mainframe technology with machines built on commodity processors and Unix-based operating systems. From there he moved into network communications to turn around the Southwest district for 3Com.

Then migrated to application software, joining Siebel Systems, the fastest growing software company in history, as Regional Director for the Southwest region. Became Vice President of Marketing for Niku which created the portfolio management software category, the equivalent of ERP systems for IT organizations.

Ran North America Sales for Epiphany Software, the marketing automation pioneer. And finally entered the cyber security space where he built and ran the new North America major account sales region for Proofpoint, the email security leader. Add to this a couple of early stage and mid-stage start-up’s, and his last position as head of M&A for Noribachi where he was in charge of selling the company, and you get the jest of Rene’s extensive corporate technology career.

Having hired hundreds of sales executives, pre-sales engineers, first line managing directors and vice presidents, Rene leveraged his extensive technology sales and management experience, and extensive network, to found Blue Lake, a boutique executive search firm that specializes in placing sales and marketing executives in cyber security and enterprise infrastructure software companies throughout North America.