Ron’s extensive executive and board experience affords him significant insight and leadership to support the company in its continued quest to improve grower profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health using natural microbiology and digital technologies.
Ron has served as an Indigo Ag board member since July 2019, and is currently also serving as an Advisor to the CEO. Ron also continues to serve as an executive partner at Flagship Pioneering, founding company of Indigo, since joining Flagship in October 2018.
Ron has an accomplished leadership background in the technology and software industries as a chief executive and adviser. Ron served as president and chief executive officer of Intralinks, Inc., and led the young public company through a strategy cycle, next generation cloud re-platforming cycle, and maturation of business processes while returning the company to double-digit revenue growth and gaining one to two points of market share per year. Prior to that, he served for six years as president and chief executive officer of Novell, Inc., where he led a strategy cycle in 2006 that gave birth to a “Workload Management” (workloads capable of running on a public and/or private cloud) strategy designed to leverage Novell’s two core assets of Linux and Identity Management, ignited the Linux business from $34-$273M of revenue over three years through a creative strategic partnership with Microsoft, and tripled the company’s overall operating margin prior to the sale of the company. Before Novell, Ron spent several years in venture capital directly assisting companies at each stage of development, from early ideation through growth phases, while serving as a board member. He started his career at IBM and served in many executive positions over approximately a 16-year period, including the latter position as general manager of numerous vertical industries solutions, encompassing retail, consumer packaged goods manufacturers, and wholesale.
Ron has also spent much of his career serving on boards of directors focusing on the creation and development of world-class boards and best governance practices. He currently serves as chair of the board of ANSYS (working on engineering simulation across many markets) since 2014, and as chair of Valo Health (a Flagship company that is transforming the drug discovery and development process) since 2019. Ron previously held a chair position on the board of Skillsoft (democratizing learning with cloud-based tools) from 2018 to June 2021 and continues to serve as a board member since the sale of Skillsoft in June 2021. His previous board experience also includes Pegasystems, ECi Solutions, and ANN Inc. (Ann Taylor) from 1998 to 2015, where he also served as executive chairman of ANN’s board for the last ten years of service.
Ron received a Bachelor of Science degree from Boston College and currently serves on the Board of Regents at Boston College with a special focus on defining and creating the new Integrated Sciences and Society efforts in life sciences.
