David Friend

David Friend is the cofounder and CEO of Wasabi, a hot cloud storage company. Wasabi marks the sixth company Friend has founded alongside Wasabi CTO Jeff Flowers. His first company, ARP Instruments, developed synthesizers used by Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, and Led Zeppelin. They even helped Steven Spielberg communicate with aliens, providing that legendary five-note communication in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

David founded or cofounded five other companies: Computer Pictures Corporation, an early player in computer graphics; Pilot Software, a company that pioneered multidimensional databases for crunching large amounts of customer data; Faxnet, which pioneered fax-to-email services; Sonexis, a VoIP conferencing company; and, immediately prior to Wasabi, Carbonite, now one of the world’s leading cloud backup companies. 

Friend is a respected philanthropist. In addition to serving on the Board of Trustees for Berklee, where there is a recital hall named in his honor, he also serves as president of the board of Boston Baroque, an orchestra and chorus that has received seven Grammy Award nominations. An avid mineral and gem collector, he donated Friend Gem and Mineral Hall at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. 

Friend graduated from Yale University and attended the Princeton University Graduate School of Engineering, where he was a David Sarnoff Fellow.