James Lau

James Lau is the co-founder and Executive Vice President of Corporate Development at NetApp, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He established the enterprise data management company in 1992 alongside David Hitz and Michael Malcolm, helping scale the business into a Fortune 500 corporation with approximately 12,000 employees and over $3 billion in annual sales. Prior to securing early venture backing from Sequoia Capital in 1994 and completing a 1995 initial public offering, Lau co-invented the Write Anywhere File Layout system and held software engineering roles at Auspex Systems and Bridge Communications. He holds degrees in computer science and engineering from UC Berkeley and Stanford University, and he currently retains approximately 3.8 million shares in NetApp valued at over $321 million. His career centers on developing foundational network infrastructure, enterprise cloud data services, and scalable storage architecture.