Ari Zilka, Founder, Terracotta

Prior to founding Terracotta in 2003, Ari was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners. Before joining Accel, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. At Walmart.com, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures.

Prior to Walmart.com, Ari worked as a consultant at Sapient and before that at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. During these years, he managed development and advised businesses on high technology strategy and deployment. His accomplishments at Sapient include the successful launch of Walmart.com, as well as successful engagements with Gap.com and Nike.com. At PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he worked with Harrod's of London, Siemens, Intel, Compaq, Barnes & Noble, and others.

Ari's career started as a software engineer for a subsidiary of Motorola, where he wrote groundbreaking wireless paging software. Since then, his software development accomplishments also include projects revolving around statistical analysis and data warehousing. In the mid 1990's, Ari invented a new object relational database that still exceeds the capabilities and performance of database technology today.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.