Introduction
Gordon L. Stitt is an American network technology business executive. He was most recently the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Nebula, Inc., a hardware and software company with offices in Mountain View, California, and Seattle, Washington.
Education and career
Stitt holds a BSEE/BSCS from Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California (1978-1980). He then received his MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
After finishing his education, Stitt worked as Director of Marketing and Sales at Ven-Tel (Ventura Telephone) in Santa Clara, California, (1982—1987). He then joined Sun Microsystems as Strategic Partner Manager (1988—1989).
After leaving Sun, Stitt co-founded Network Peripherals in 1989 and served first as its vice president of marketing, and then as vice president and general manager of the OEM business unit. Network Peripherals was the largest vendor of the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) technology while it was popular in the 1990s.
In 1996, he co-founded Extreme Networks and served as chief executive officer until 2006 (but continued as chairman of the board of directors). Mark Canepa replaced him as the CEO of Extreme in August 2006. On the company's name, Stitt said the name referred to extreme skiing. In 2001, Stitt was a national finalist and award recipient of the EY Entrepreneur of The Year Award.
In June 2007, Stitt joined the board of directors of Barracuda Networks. In July 2009, he returned to Extreme Networks for a temporary market development role. He was on the board of directors of RGB Networks through 2013, and the board of directors of Skyfire from 2006 to 2014.
In 2013, Stitt became chief executive at Nebula, a hardware and software company founded in March 2011 by former NASA Ames Research Center chief technology officer Chris C. Kemp, long-time colleague Devin Carlen, entrepreneur Steve O'Hara, with software engineer Tres Henry, formerly at Amazon Web Services.