Our Founders

Currently Hector works as a CRM Strategy & Platform Leader at AWS and is a U.S. Air Force veteran who served during Operation Desert Storm and originally hails from San Antonio, Texas. Hector served a total of seven years as both an Air Force medic and as a civil service nurse based at Lackland AFB and Sheppard AFB, Texas. After his military career Hector took advantage of the GI bill and attended the University of Texas at Austin where he received his B.B.A. and later went on to earn his M.B.A. from Texas State University. Hector was included in CIO Magazine 100 Winners in 2009 and has led Enterprise Salesforce delivery teams at Dell and Fidelity. He has been recognized as a trailblazer in the Salesforce ecosystem and currently sits on the Salesforce Platform Customer Advisory Board. He has also served on the Big Brothers Big Sisters Board of Directors, been a “Big” since 2010 and was named “Big of the Year” for the state of Texas in 2014.

Joe Castro currently holds the CTO role for Appirio, a platinum partner of Salesforce, and is a Salesforce Certified Technical architect, the highest accreditation offered by Salesforce. He also sits on the Salesforce Partner Advisory Board and the CTA Review Board. Joe and Hector are longtime friends and colleagues who rolled out Salesforce at Dell in 2007. Joe believes that the best education possible is the foundation of opportunity, making him the perfect person to lead the development of all Merivis training curriculum and virtual training applications for our cohorts. B.A. from Rice University and an MBA from McCombs School of Business at UT Austin.

Kate grew up in a family with a history of military service and was raised to value “service to a greater good” as a way of life. As a senior marketing leader for companies like Dell and Cisco, she learned to harness the power of strategic thinking, planning and creating a playbook for success. She combines that professional experience with over a decade of volunteering in leadership capacities to nonprofits in the Austin community. She took on the role of Merivis employee #1 with ambition and dedication. As a co-founder of the organization, Kate has been personally invested in the mission of Merivis from its inception and ensures its original mission is realized through everything we do. Kate received a B.A. in Economics and an MBA from the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin.