Board Leadership Team Biography

Dave Barrett

General Partner
Polaris Venture Partners

Dave is a general partner who brought more than 20 years of experience as an operating executive & entrepreneur to Polaris in May 2000.

He focuses on seed, early & expansion stage investment opportunities in technology. Dave is exceptionally experienced in on-demand and internet software business models, with particular background in SaaS, Cloud, Financial and Healthcare technologies.

A leader of publicly-held software and services leaders during their periods of highest growth, Dave consistently built teams which achieved dominant market share and extraordinary enterprise value.

Prior to joining Polaris, he served as chief operating officer of Calico Commerce, a leading sell-side e-business infrastructure provider. During his leadership, the company evolved from venture-backed startup to one of the top-performing IPOs of 1999 with market value in excess of $3.5B. Before that, he served as senior vice president of worldwide operations for Pure Atria Software Corporation; a publicly-held market leader in software development automation, continuing in that role after the company was acquired by Rational Software Corporation for $1B in 1997. Prior, he spent twelve years with Lotus Development Corporation/IBM. As vice president & general manager of field sales and services, his organization served as an industry model and helped to establish Lotus Notes as a market-defining standard. As general manager of worldwide federal systems, his was the fastest-growing division in the company. Lotus was acquired by IBM in 1995 for $3.5B, the then-largest merger in software industry history.

Dave represents Polaris on the boards of Confluence, Egnyte, Imprivata, LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM), MarkMonitor, Phytel and VKernel.

He previously served on the boards of Centra Software (NASDAQ: CTRA), Archivas (acquired by Hitachi Data Systems; NYSE: HIT) and 170 Systems(acquired by Kofax; LSE:KFX.L).

In addition to his Polaris portfolio company boards, Dave also serves on the Microsoft Venture Capital Advisory Board, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) Private Equity Board, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Board of Trustees.

Dave is an Always-On VC 100 & VC East 50 recipient as well as a Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council Investor of the Year finalist. He’s an active participant in the Dogpatch Labs community and both a TechStars & IBM SmartCamp Mentor.

Dave holds a B.S. from The University of Rhode Island.