Katrina Garnett

Katrina is a successful serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and start-up investor. Her previous early seed and startup investments include Siebel Software (which later went public and was acquired by Oracle), Salesforce.com (trades as CRM), and Tapulous, creator of the #1 music iPhone app (Tap Tap Revenge), which was sold to Disney Entertainment on July 1, 2010. Katrina was also a member of the Royal Bank of Canada Technology Venture Advisory Board. Katrina is also one of a group of investors that purchased a majority share in the Sacramento Kings NBA team to keep the team in Sacramento. 

Prior to Garnett Ventures, Katrina founded My Little Swans (MLS), an online travel site dedicated to high-end family travel and lifestyle. MLS’s approach allowed users to research and contact the best on-the-ground tour companies directly, and create itineraries based on vetted experiences. The site reflects over 17 years of Garnett family trips and includes detailed guides to 46 global destinations, along with inspirational, “real life” photos and maps. 

Katrina was the Founder, Chairman and President/CEO of CrossWorlds Software Inc. from its inception in 1996 to a successful public offering on Nasdaq (CWLD) in 2000 and acquisition by IBM in 2001. Her pioneering vision led to the establishment of a new software industry segment around the concept of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and in the process she built up a global public company that had annual revenues of over $100M and 450 employees.

Garnett raised over $80M in startup funding for CrossWorlds from technology giants such as Intel, SAP, Compaq, Ernst & Young, JD Edwards and Manugistics as well as key investors such as Michael Dell, Dave Duffield, Soros Technology Partners, Deutsche Bank and Amerindo. As a software industry luminary, Garnett was featured twice on the cover of Forbes magazine, selected by Fortune magazine as CEO of one of their 25 top startup technology companies in 1997 and regularly interviewed by leading TV shows such as CNBC and CNN.

Prior to founding CrossWorlds, Garnett served as Vice President and GM of Sybase’s $150M Distributed, Objects and Connectivity Division (1990-1996), where she managed a 300-person software development team. In this capacity she was responsible for the Company’s next generation Object Database, Replication Server for global trading systems, and Messaging Middleware. Other products developed by her group included Sybase’s Massively Parallel Processing offering for high-end decision support systems. Prior to Sybase, Mrs. Garnett worked at Oracle 1986-1990 (when it grew from $75M to over $1B in sales), where she served in technical management positions.

Garnett holds numerous software patents including, Inventor of Patent No. 5,913, 061 for ‘Modular Application Collaboration’ and Patent No. 6,094,688 for ‘Modular Application Collaboration Including Filtering at the Source and Proxy Execution of Compensating Transactions to Conserve Server Resources’. 

Katrina has a B.S. degree from the State University of New York, Masters in Marketing from Webster University in Switzerland, and participated in Standford's Graduate School of Business Entrepreneurship program.