Lane Bess

Bess was born in Neptune City, New Jersey and graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1979.[3]

In 1983, Bess received a Bachelor of Science degree in Managerial Economics from Carnegie Mellon University, then went on to receive an MBA degree from University of Dayton. Bess has served as a Trustee of Carnegie Mellon University since June 2019.[4] [5][6]

Early in his career, Bess held senior sales and marketing positions at NCR Corporation, where he oversaw multinational global sales.[7][8] Then he went on to AT&T, where he was responsible for the product launches of AT&T's business and consumer internet services in the mid-1990s.[9]

From 2002 to 2008, Bess served as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and General Manager of Trend Micro.[10][11] In 2008, he became president and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, where he served until 2011, leading late fundraising and taking the company to its Initial public offering.[12][13][14] From 2011 to 2015, Bess was the COO of Zscaler, a company focused on cloud-based internet security services.[15][16][17]

Bess serves on the boards of several companies, including Deep Instinct,[18][19] eSentire, TrueFort, ZeroFOX, PLUM (SPAC).[11][20][21][22][23][24][25]

In March 2015, Bess founded Bess Ventures and Advisory, where he serves as founder and principal. Some well-known investments of Bess Ventures and Advisory include Arista Networks, Nutanix, ThoughtSpot, Rubrik and Zscaler.[26]

On November 23, 2021, it was announced that Bess would fly into space aboard Blue Origin NS-19.[27][28][29] The flight took place December 11, 2021.

Bess lives in Miami Beach, Florida with his wife Letty.[30] His son Cameron Bess accompanied him to space aboard Blue Origin NS-19, making them the first parent-child pair to fly to space together.[31][32][33][34]