Lexi Reese

Board Term: 2025-present

Lexi Reese is co-founder and CEO of Lanai, the first AI-native enterprise prompt observability and security platform. Founded in 2024 with the vision to empower humans to do extraordinary things with AI, Lanai works with large and scaling enterprises to organize AI @ work and make it visible, secure, and impactful.
Reese has spent her career building the invisible infrastructure that shapes how we work and live. At Google, she led the multi-billion dollar ML-powered programmatic advertising platform that became the company's third-largest revenue source—infrastructure so fundamental to the internet economy that most people never think about it, yet it processes billions of automated decisions daily. At Gusto, she scaled the customer base to 200,000+ businesses and 1 million employees, driving 30x revenue growth while building the payroll and benefits systems that quietly support workers' livelihoods.

This experience building transformative yet invisible infrastructure led Reese to recognize what she calls the "Blind AI Mandate" problem—companies telling employees to use more AI while having no system to track what tools are being used, what they're being used for, or what risks they're creating. At Lanai, which she co-founded with former VMware CTO Steve Herrod (who co-invented x86 virtualization that enabled cloud computing as we know it today), she leads a team of infrastructure veterans who built the systems behind every major platform shift.

A UVA alumna ('96) and former Echols Scholar who studied Latin American History with professors Tico Braun and Brian Owensby, Reese credits her liberal arts education with teaching her to see patterns across disciplines—a skill that has served her well moving between Google's technical challenges, Gusto's operational complexities, and now Lanai's attempt to make sense of enterprise AI adoption. Her leadership experience includes roles as a Harvard Business School Fellow, board member at Gap Inc. and Lattice, and membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. She also ran for California's U.S. Senate seat, reflecting her commitment to merging technological advancement with equitable policy.

Reese lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two children who just clicked over to the teen years.