Kim Karin Polese (born November 13, 1961) is a previous CEO of SpikeSource, and was one of the most prominent Silicon Valley executives during the dot-com era. In 1997, she made Time Magazine's list of "The 25 Most Influential Americans".

After a stint at Intellicorp, Ms. Polese spent more than seven years with Sun Microsystems, where she was the original Java product manager who influenced the transition of its internal name of "Oak" to "Java".

After leaving Sun in 1996 she co-founded Marimba, a Java-based business, where she served as CEO until 2000, leading Marimba through its public offering in 1999 and bringing it to profitability before selling it to BMC Software for $239 million in 2004.

Since September 2004 and until recently, Polese has been CEO of SpikeSource, a provider of business-ready open source solutions. The company was incubated in 2003 at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers by Ray Lane, and launched its first products in April 2005. Series A and B investors include Intel Capital, and Fidelity Ventures and the Omidyar Network among others.

Polese serves on the board of the Global Security Institute, the Long Now Foundation and the University of California President's Board on Science and Innovation. She also serves on the executive council of TechNet, a bipartisan network of executives that promotes the growth of the technology economy and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

Polese served on the board of Technorati, Inc. from 2004 to 2006.

On 2010 she received the second Symons Innovator Award given annually by NCWIT to honor successful women entrepreneurs in technology.

NOTE: Bio updated on June 14, 2011.