About
Mission

Simon Anderson is the founder and CEO of Mission and has steered the company from its inception in 2017 to 10X its revenue and become one of the top 20 global services partners to AWS. His journey in the tech industry is marked by significant achievements and leadership roles across globally recognized firms. Starting his career in Australia in law with PWC Legal and then at Allen & Buckeridge venture capital firm, he gained early experience with commercial law and venture capital, while contributing to substantial investments like Hitwise, which sold to Experian. His strategic acumen flourished in California at Affinity Internet, where he spearheaded web and ecommerce partnerships with major corporations such as eBay, Comcast, and Costco.

Simon’s technology leadership career continued at video ad network startup BiggerBoat and photography SaaS platform Pictage, before becoming CEO of DreamHost from 2011 to 2015, the #1 WordPress web hosting company in the world. DreamHost tripled its revenue and customers over 5 years, and Simon played a pivotal role in launching an open-source public cloud service, DreamCloud, using the OpenStack platform built by Rackspace and NASA. While there, Simon also co-founded the first software defined storage startup, Inktank, which was acquired by RedHat in 2014 for $175M. 

In 2017, Simon teamed up with Great Hill Partners to found Mission, where he has embedded a culture of innovation, customer success, and strategic partnership with AWS. Simon’s philosophy as founder and CEO of Mission is to strive for excellence in supporting US companies to use cloud and AI technology well and to its fullest potential.

Ted Stuart, President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), joined Mission as Chief Revenue Officer in 2018 and brings over 20 years of leadership experience in customer-facing roles. Under Ted’s leadership, Mission has increased year-over-year revenue by 10X, solidifying its status as one of AWS’s top revenue-generating partners. 

Prior to Mission, Ted held leadership roles at Deem and Oracle, establishing himself as a successful sales leader in the industry.

In his current role as President and COO, Ted is at the forefront of guiding key aspects of the business, including Service Delivery, Platform Development, Customer Success, and Go-To-Market strategies. His commitment to customer obsession ensures Mission delivers a seamless and integrated approach across all facets of customer-facing operations.

Outside of work, you can find Ted hitting the slopes with his daughters.

As Chief People Officer, Karoline Saffi has been pivotal in leading the People and Culture team at Mission for six years. Under her leadership, Mission has maintained an employee net promoter score (eNPS) consistently above 80%, far above the tech industry’s average eNPS of 26%.

Karoline is highly passionate about driving equitable opportunities within the cloud. Her efforts have focused on creating a supportive and inclusive environment, driving talent development, and leveraging non-traditional talent pools to foster diversity and inclusion. Under her leadership, Mission has filled over 20% of its roles through its Evolution program, and has been named one of the best places to work for six consecutive years.

Karoline’s philosophy for People and Culture centers on cultivating a healthy workplace environment where both employee well-being and organizational goals are met harmoniously. In her free time, Karoline embraces life by seeing live music, collecting art from local artists, and leading Mission’s women’s employee resource group, WISDOM.

Stewart Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mission, brings over 20 years of global expertise in finance, accounting, and operations. Previously, Stewart served as a senior manager at Deloitte & Touche, where he gained in-depth experience in the technology and software industries, balancing between Audit Services and Mergers & Acquisitions. During Stewart’s 6 year tenure at Oblong Industries, he successfully led and raised $85 million in new equity investments. His strategic financial leadership at Mission has been pivotal, steering the company to become a top managed and professional services partner to AWS in the US, and scaling the business to achieve over $80M in run-rate revenue with a team of more than 300 professionals and 500+ customers.

In his role at Mission, Stewart oversees critical areas such as Financial Planning and Analysis, Accounting, Treasury, Risk Management, and Compliance, ensuring effective utilization of financial resources to enhance profitability and drive growth. His strategic mindset is vital in Investor Relations and Capital Allocation, aligning financial performance with long-term growth objectives and shareholder value. 

In his free time, Stewart enjoys volunteering and getting outdoors in beautiful Ojai with his wife and kids.

Luanne Tierney is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Mission and leads a world-class marketing team and channel and alliances team. As CMO, she drives growth for Mission and AWS through an innovative go-to-market strategy including partner marketing, demand generation, product marketing, content, channel marketing, field enablement, field and channel events, and public relations.

With over two decades of success as a technology marketing and channel executive, Luanne has led go-to-market strategies for startups and Fortune 1000 companies. Before joining Mission, Luanne led teams at many influential tech companies, including Cisco, Proofpoint, and Juniper Networks. During her tenure as the VP of Global Partner Marketing at Cisco, revenue through partners increased 5X – from 38% to over 80% of Cisco’s revenues.

In her free time, you can find Luanne on the course perfecting her golf swing and creating opportunities for the next generation of leaders to succeed.

Jonathan LaCour has a distinguished background in technology with significant achievements in cloud services. His career began in Enterprise Healthcare before he became the founding CTO of a successful startup. Jonathan then played a pivotal role at DreamHost, where he led the launch of the first public cloud object storage service built on Ceph and the creation of an OpenStack public cloud featuring software-defined networking and storage. His tenure at DreamHost also included the sale of a spin-off company, InkTank, to RedHat in one of the biggest commercial open-source success stories in history.

At Mission, Jonathan has led platform, product, and service delivery, and more recently was the visionary behind the launch of Mission Control, growing its user base to 2,000 individuals and 400 companies in just eighteen months. Under his leadership, the platform has maintained a customer satisfaction score of 4.7+, reflecting his commitment to customer experience. Jonathan's philosophy as a product-minded CTO emphasizes the future of enterprise software transitioning to "services as software," integrating services and software to address complex business challenges more effectively than traditional Enterprise SaaS.

Within his 6 years at Mission, Jonathan has overseen one of the company's most rapid growth periods, culminating in launching Mission Cloud Score on the AWS Marketplace and establishing Mission as a recognized Independent Software Vendor (ISV) by AWS. When he isn’t hunkered down behind his laptop, he loves spending time with his wife, two children, and pugs.

Caleb Mills is the Chief Customer Officer at Mission. With a tenure spanning over 6 years, Caleb has been instrumental in each facet of service delivery at Mission, having led every delivery team from DevOps to to FinOps to Professional Services. Under Caleb’s leadership, the service delivery team at Mission has grown 5X, while at the same time elevating customer satisfaction metrics to an all-time high. 

Caleb’s strategic advisory has been pivotal in customer experience and service delivery leadership roles throughout his career. At G2 Tech Group, Caleb was instrumental in the company's successful acquisition by Great Hill Partners. During his tenure at Nuance (acquired by Microsoft), Caleb led data center operations for the healthcare division and played a critical role in the operation  of their Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing solutions.

As Chief Customer Officer, Caleb is dedicated to ensuring that every customer interaction not only meets but exceeds expectations. He oversees all post-sale customer engagements with a steadfast commitment to delivering tangible business outcomes. Caleb's philosophy centers on being straightforward and honest, always focusing on what Mission can deliver to foster successful, outcome-focused relationships.

Outside the office, Caleb enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife and two kids.

Dr. Ryan Ries is a renowned data scientist with more than 15 years of leadership experience in data and engineering at fast-scaling technology companies. Dr. Ries holds over 20 years of experience working with AI and 5+ years helping customers build their AWS data infrastructure and AI models. After earning his Ph.D. in Biophysical Chemistry at UCLA and Caltech, Dr. Ries has helped develop cutting-edge data solutions for the U.S. Department of Defense and a myriad of Fortune 500 companies. As Chief AI and Data Scientist for Mission, Ryan has built out a successful team of Data Engineers, Data Architects, ML Engineers and Data Scientists to solve some of the hardest problems in the world utilizing AWS infrastructure.