Why Mesa exists

I started my career over twenty years ago in Australia, as a market analyst covering infrastructure management, systems management, network management, storage software, and the earliest cybersecurity software — mostly antivirus, a handful of firewall vendors, and business continuity — back before cloud existed. I was an award-winning analyst. Years later I earned an MBA and became a consulting director across software markets in EMEA. I’ve lived in Sydney, in France, and across Asia-Pacific and Europe. I’m American, and I came to Silicon Valley when my son was born.

For years after that I worked mostly in marketing roles — but my heart was always in strategy and innovation, and I kept getting pulled into chief architect meetings at the software companies I worked for, running product marketing across their entire portfolios. Like a lot of women in enterprise tech at the time, it took longer than it should have to get the seat those meetings implied I’d already earned. That changed when a former IDC leader recruited me to build and run NTT’s Global Innovation Center — the bridge between NTT’s global corporation, its 900 operating companies, Japan, and Silicon Valley.

That job put me inside the actual machinery of enterprise innovation: how corporations, venture capital firms, and the CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and Chief AI Officers who run the world’s largest companies work with startups to adopt new technology. I hosted 10,000 senior leaders across more than 200 events, council meetings, summits, and day-long agendas. And I watched the same gap show up again and again: enormous R&D and M&A activity happening inside big corporations, and a Silicon Valley venture ecosystem that mostly deals with itself — venture-backed startups selling to other venture-backed startups, moving through their early stages together, until the good deals get swept up and everyone else is left chasing. Founders routinely talk to a hundred investors before they get funded. The direct line between enterprises and the startups who need them is broken.

When the Innovation Center closed, a board member invited me to start a venture studio. I realized fairly quickly that a venture studio built for one corporation was the wrong shape for the problem — strategic corporate VC struggles precisely because deal evaluation is slow, and by the time a big company decides, Silicon Valley has already moved on. What’s actually needed is what I’d already built at NTT: an analyst function, a venture studio, strategic corporate venture capital, and a community platform, combined — independent of any single corporation.

So I’m going back to where I started: market research. This is one of the most confusing times I’ve experienced since I began as an analyst — boards and executive teams are trying to figure out how to use AI safely, competitively, and in production, against a backdrop of real governance and security concerns and no shortage of apocalyptic headlines. Mesa’s job is to go find out, directly from the people making these decisions, what’s actually happening — and build the research, the community, and eventually the capital vehicle that closes the gap I’ve spent a career watching.