Technology as a competitive advantage, from the IT org to the factory floor.

Aaron Katske is a technology executive with two decades of experience turning IT and security functions into strategic business assets. He builds and scales the systems, teams, and controls that fast-moving companies run on — and he does it in the environments where the margin for error is thinnest: venture-backed hardware startups, hypergrowth manufacturers, and companies preparing for audit, certification, and IPO.

What sets him apart is range. Most technology leaders never leave the IT org. Aaron has run operations end to end — at Velo3D the CEO handed him Manufacturing, Quality, Supply Chain, Logistics, NPI, and Facilities alongside IT and security: 175 people across eight departments, roughly 70% of the company and about $60M in combined budget. He has closed over $100M in real estate transactions and delivered $10M of build-outs in under two years, both under budget; rebuilt infrastructure from coin-flip uptime to 99.9%; taken a checkbox-compliance security posture to a clean full-scope ISO 27001:2022 audit with zero non-conformities; and designed pre- and post-IPO controls that cleared audit with zero material weaknesses.

He is also running a production agentic AI program, scaling AI to hundreds of users while bringing tool sprawl under formal risk treatment, and using AI agents to bend the IT staffing curve rather than adding headcount to it. The ISO 27001 program he runs is positioned to extend toward ISO/IEC 42001 (AI management systems) and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework as the governance program matures.

He leads by learning the business first. Before technology, he trained as a chef and earned a degree from the California Culinary Academy — where he learned to run a line under pressure, a discipline that still shapes how he runs an operation. He has grown through repeated promotions by seeing what needed to be done and doing it.