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Leadership

Abaca's leaders bring decades of diverse experience and a history of success. Combining business acumen with technical savvy, these executives guide the company to create innovative products and solutions that enable a secure messaging environment for corporations, educational facilities, and other institutions.

Management Team

Steve Kirsch
CEO and Chairman of the Board

Steve is the Founder and Chairman of Abaca. He founded the company in 2005 with a vision to create the perfect email spam filter.

Steve has been involved with the Internet and high-tech companies for more than 27 years. Since the early 80s, he has founded four successful technology companies. Prior to Abaca, he founded Propel Software, the leader in Internet and email acceleration. Prior to that, he founded Infoseek Corporation, which was acquired by Disney in November of 1999. While at Infoseek, Steve was responsible for creating many of the company's award-winning products, including the NetSearch service, Ultraseek Server, Infoseek Express, GO Guides, and GO Auction.

Steve's first start up was Mouse Systems Corporation. Afterward, he founded Frame Technology, which was acquired by Adobe.

Steve is also an active philanthropist and together with his wife Michele, started a $75 million foundation, which donates to a wide variety of charitable causes. In 1999, Steve and Michele were named Outstanding Philanthropists of the Year by the Silicon Valley chapter of the National Society of Fund Raising Executives, and recognized by Slate Magazine as the 8th largest charitable givers in America.

Steve holds both B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Read the Steve Kirsch story.

John Jefferies
General Manager and Chief Marketing Officer

John Jefferies career in Internet security spans more than 10 years, having held senior management positions at IronKey, RedCannon, Teros (acquired by Citrix), Differential (acquired by Valicert), Pario (acquired by Lucent) and Dascom (acquired by IBM.)

John joined Abaca from IronKey where he transformed the company into the leading enterprise and government solution. Prior to IronKey he was VP of Marketing at RedCannon Security which was selected as one of Gartner Group's cool companies for 2007.

Mr. Jefferies obtained his MBA from the Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario and his BA in Business from Michigan State University.

Andrew E. Newton
Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary

Drew has more than 35 years of legal experience in the high technology and Internet fields. Since the late 70s he has created and managed the legal departments at five companies. He was actively involved in taking Infoseek Corporation and Frame Technology Corporation successfully through their IPOs.

Drew co-founded Propel Software and Infoseek with Steve Kirsch. Infoseek was acquired by Disney in November of 1999. Before Infoseek, Drew established the legal group as Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at Frame Technology, which was acquired by Adobe Systems.

He previously held general counsel positions at Digital Research and Amdahl Corporation, and held several legal positions at Honeywell Information Systems prior to joining Amdahl.

Drew holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.

Bill Kasje
Vice President of Business Development

Bill comes to Abaca with 20 years of high technology experience, holding key positions in business development and engineering management.

Prior to joining Abaca, Bill was Director of Corporate Development for Mirapoint, where he helped to establish and grow partnerships with leading global and regional OEMs and strategic alliance partners, creating revenue producing relationships and contributing significantly to the company’s overall direction and success. Prior to launching the company’s corporate development efforts, he led the engineering organization responsible for developing the industry’s first email security appliance. Before Mirapoint, Bill held key engineering management positions at Sequent Computer Systems (acquired by IBM) where he was responsible for the clustered systems and file systems groups. Bill started his career as a performance engineer at Hewlett Packard.

Bill holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from California State University, Chico.