John Kim is a Co-founder and Managing Partner of HighBar Partners. Prior to HighBar, Mr. Kim was with W Capital Partners, a private equity fund with over $1 billion under management that makes and acquires direct investments in growth equity technology companies. Mr. Kim joined as the firm’s first employee in 2003. During his time at W Capital, Mr. Kim invested in special situations and secondary direct acquisitions from corporations, financial institutions and general partnerships.

Prior to W Capital, Mr. Kim was Director of Corporate Development at Zeborg (acquired by Emptoris), a venture-backed enterprise software company spun off from The Mitchell Madison Group, where he focused on operations and corporate strategy. He was also Director of Investments at ISL Management, a venture capital firm funded by JPMorgan dedicated to early stage software and financial service investments.

Prior thereto, Mr. Kim was an investment banker with JPMorgan Chase (and its predecessors) and Robertson Stephens, where he worked on complex M&A and leveraged finance transactions across sectors including technology, financial services, healthcare and industrials.

Mr. Kim holds a BS in Economics from The University of Chicago and an MBA, with Honors, from Columbia Business School.

Morris Zhang joined HighBar Partners from Gaia Equity, a private equity firm focused on investing in lower middle-market software companies. As an Associate at Gaia Equity, Mr. Zhang focused on investment origination, transaction execution, and due diligence efforts across customer service/experience, supply chain, and process automation sectors.

Mr. Zhang started his career at Horizon Partners, an investment bank in San Francisco. At Horizon, he helped execute on several transactions for technology businesses, totaling $100M+ in deal value, and sourced a number of clients for the firm.

Mr. Zhang holds a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley.

Alan Elliot joined HighBar Partners as an Operating Executive focused on Sales & Marketing after spending 20 years sales leadership experience in software start-ups with a focus on Cybersecurity and SaaS.  Prior to joining HighBar, Mr. Elliot served as Chief Revenue Officer for Logz.io, Chief Commercial Officer for SS8, Head of Global Revenue for Janrain, and SVP of Worldwide Sales for PAS. Mr. Elliot received his BBA, with an emphasis in Marketing from Loyola Marymount University.

Tarkan Maner is the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix where he leads global business development and corporate development efforts, with a focus on strategic partnerships, alliances, system integrators, and service providers. Additionally, his responsibilities include leading critical hybrid cloud-focused strategy and product teams including Nutanix’s core virtualization platform (AHV), software-defined networking, and some of the key hybrid cloud services. Before joining Nutanix, he served as Chairman and CEO at Nexenta Systems, Inc., leading the organization from its open-source focus through its acquisition by DataDirect Networks (DDN) in May 2019. Prior to Nexenta, he was the President and CEO at Wyse Technology, one of the virtual desktop computing pioneers acquired by Dell in 2012. He also held executive roles at Dell, CA Technologies, IBM, and Sterling Software. Tarkan serves and served on the boards of several organizations including Teradici, CloudCheckr, Wheels, and leading non-profit organizations in Silicon Valley. Tarkan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering management, an MBA from Midwestern State University and an AMP from Harvard Business School.

Bob Migliorino is a founding partner of W Capital. Bob brings 30 years of experience in operations, management and venture capital having led business operations and turnarounds for several GE businesses and as a founding partner of a leading venture capital fund. Bob has significant industry expertise in the software, internet, digital media and technology services industries.

Prior to the founding of W Capital in 2001, Bob was a founding partner of Canaan Partners, having participated in the management buyout of General Electric’s venture capital arm (GEVENCO) to form Canaan. At Canaan, Bob invested in a range of portfolio companies with a focus in software and technology services. Prior to forming Canaan, Bob spent 15 years with General Electric with operating roles in GE’s Information Services, Industrial and Power Delivery divisions. Bob holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Drexel University.