Barry Crist has more than 20 years of experience in driving enterprise customer success and adoption with both open source and DevOps software solutions. Prior to joining Chef, he was an Executive-in-Residence at Ignition Partners, a Chef investor. He was previously CEO of Likewise, a company with a strong open source to enterprise go-to-market model that had wide industry reach including OEM agreements with VMware, Dell, HP, Riverbed, and EMC. Likewise was acquired by EMC Isilon in September 2012.

Prior to Likewise, Crist served as Vice President of the Application Management group at Mercury, now a division of HP, where he grew North American sales from less than $1 million to more than $75 million. Crist led enterprise sales organizations at Network Associates (now McAfee) and was in various sales, technical, and international roles at Apple.