MEET VANILLA

Nick Beim

Nick Beim is a Partner at Venrock, the venture capital firm created by the Rockefeller family that helped pioneer the venture capital industry. He has been an early investor in companies including Dataminr, Interos, Altruist, Rebellion Defense, Percipient.ai, Chisel.ai, Quiq, JBoss, and Care.com.

Robert Thornton

Robert Thornton currently serves as President of First Republic Investment Management and President of First Republic Private Wealth Management. He became Executive Vice President of First Republic Bank in 2015 and oversees banking activities for the Palm Beach region. Prior to joining First Republic, Mr. Thornton held senior roles at Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.

F. William McNabb III

William McNabb is the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Vanguard. He joined Vanguard in 1986. In 2008, he became Chief Executive Officer; in 2010, he became Chairman of the Board of Directors and the Board of Trustees. He stepped down as Chief Executive Officer at the end of 2017 and as Chairman at the end of 2018. Earlier in his career, he led each of Vanguard’s client facing business divisions.

Jon Rosenbaum

Jon (also known by friends and co-workers as “Rosie”) joined Insight in 2014. He focuses on vertical and horizontal application software and is responsible for executing transactions and assisting in portfolio management post-close. He has also specialized in helping portfolio companies source and execute M&A.

He currently is a board director at a number of Insight companies, including 6sense, LeanTaaS, SimpleNexus, Templafy, Florence, ComplianceQuest, and Earnix. Some of his exits include DocuSign (NASDAQ: DOCU), nCino (NASDAQ: NCNO), Frontline Education (acquired by Thoma Bravo), and CloudCraze (acquired by Salesforce).

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, where he received the Spade Award and was the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Commencement Speaker.

Outside of work, Jon plays soccer in NYC intramural leagues, enjoys reading, struggles to learn guitar, and is an unabashed Philadelphia sports fan.

Steve Lockshin

In addition to the co-founder of Vanilla, Steve Lockshin is a Founder and Principal of AdvicePeriod and former Chairman of Convergent Wealth Advisors (formerly Lydian Wealth Management), a company he founded in 1994. Steve helped pioneer the independent advisory industry, building one of the largest independent RIAs in the nation. Lydian Wealth Management was acquired by City National Bank(NYSE:CYN)) in 2007.

Steve is widely known for his contemporary approach to wealth advisory as well as his estate-planning knowledge and is a frequent speaker on both topics. He memorialized his concerns about conflicts of interest in the industry in his guide for consumers, Get Wise to Your Advisor (John Wiley & Sons: 2013).

Gene Farrell

CEO, Vanilla

With over 25 years of executive leadership experience driving transformation and growth across the consumer and technology industries, Gene is a recognized thought leader and innovator known for building disruptive new businesses for global brands.

Gene joined Vanilla as the company’s CEO in 2021 after four and a half years at Smartsheet, where he helped take the company public and scale the business from $100M to over $500M in revenue. As Smartsheet’s Chief Strategy and Product Officer, Gene was responsible for leading company strategy, corporate development, product management, product marketing, experience design, and strategic alliances.

Prior to Smartsheet, Gene spent five years at Amazon Web Services, where he served as vice president responsible for enterprise computing. In this role, Gene pioneered new cloud businesses including Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon Chime. Before Amazon, Gene was a vice president at the Coca-Cola Company, where he founded and led the creation of the Coca-Cola Freestyle beverage platform. His groundbreaking work on Coca-Cola Freestyle was recognized by Forbes as one of the best new products of the decade and received the Edison Gold Innovation and Catalyst Design awards.