At Best Startup US we track over 1,000,000 US startups and over 3 million people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top California based Chairman operating in the Software space. If you think a Chairman is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.us.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
John Warnock
Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of Adobe
Since John Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Charles Geschke, the two have worked closely together to develop a stream of pioneering software products that have established Adobe as a leader and innovator in digital experiences across every screen. For nearly three decades, Warnock’s vision and passion have been integral to Adobe’s success, building the company from a small start-up to one of the largest, most recognized software brands in the world. He was president of Adobe for the company’s first two years and CEO for the next 16 years. Warnock retired as CEO in 2000 and as the company’s CTO in 2001. Today, he is co-chairman of the board with Geschke, continuing to shape direction for the company with more than $4 billion in annual revenue. Before co-founding Adobe, Warnock was a principal scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Prior to joining Xerox, he held key positions at Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM and the University of Utah. Among many awards, Warnock, along with Geschke, was the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, one of the nation’s highest honors bestowed on scientists, engineers and inventors. Warnock holds a doctorate in electrical engineering (computer science), a master’s degree in mathematics and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He was also awarded an honorary degree in science from the University of Utah.
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About : Adobe is a software company that provides its users with digital marketing and media solutions.
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Charles Geschke
Chairman of the Board of Directors of Adobe
Charles Geschke co-founded Adobe in 1982 with John Warnock, driving technology innovations that forever transformed how people create and consume content across every screen. A respected and inspiring industry leader, Geschke was instrumental in developing some of the software industry’s most pioneering technologies. Through his vision and passion, Geschke helped build Adobe from a start-up into one of the world’s largest software companies. Today, he and Warnock are co-chairmen of Adobe’s board of directors and continue to shape direction for the company with more than $4 billion in annual revenue. Geschke has served as chairman of the board with Warnock since September 1997. He was chief operating officer of Adobe from December 1986 until July 1994 and president from April 1989 until his retirement in April 2000. Prior to co-founding Adobe, Geschke formed the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and was a principal scientist and researcher at Xerox PARC’s Computer Sciences Laboratory. Among many awards, Geschke, along with Warnock, was the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, one of the nation’s highest honors bestowed on scientists, engineers and inventors. Geschke holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University as well as a master’s degree in mathematics and an A.B. in classics, both from Xavier University.
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About : Adobe is a software company that provides its users with digital marketing and media solutions.
Christopher Kirchner
Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Slync.io
Christopher S. Kirchner is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO at Slync.io. Prior to this, Christopher has worked as a senior vice president of sales and marketing and a director of marketing and sales at Turner Labels. Christopher holds a degree in communications, minor marketing from the University of Kentucky.
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About Slync.io: Slync.io is a provider of process automation for enterprise supply chains and the global logistics industry.
Mike Einziger
Co-Founder & Co-Chairman of Mixhalo
Michael Aaron “Mike” Einziger (born June 21, 1976) is an American musician, best known as the guitarist and co-songwriter of the rock band Incubus. Einziger is widely known as an innovator and enthusiast of the use of pedalboard guitar effects during live concerts, and was voted #41 in Total Guitar’s top 100 guitarists of all time in 2002. In an interview with Gibson Guitars, writer Steven Rosen states “[Einziger] hasn’t played the guitar so much as he has manipulated it, submitted it to his own needs. Einziger fashions a sonic tapestry that draws heavily from the Zappa/Vai/Hendrix school of rock.”[1] Mike is also an active composer, writing his first full-scale orchestral concert entitled “End.>vacuum”, as well as “Forced Curvature of Reflective Surfaces”; an experimental composition that was featured at the “West Coast, Left Coast” Festival at Walt Disney Concert Hall. He co-wrote and played acoustic guitar on Avicii’s 2013 worldwide hit “Wake Me Up”.[2] Alongside this, Einziger also recently co-wrote and played guitar on David Guetta’s Lovers on the Sun. Outside of his work with Incubus, Einziger founded his own project Time Lapse Consortium in 2003. The group featured Incubus musicians Jose Pasillas II and Ben Kenney (who was not a member of Incubus at the time), Neal Evans of the band Soulive, and long-time collaborator Suzie Katayama contributing string arrangements. The band had their debut show at The Roxy in LA, and would go on to play Jimmy Kimmel and the Knitting Factory in New York City. In 2003 Einziger contributed to Ziggy Marley’s debut solo album Dragonfly alongside fellow Incubus member Chris Kilmore as well as Flea and John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers.[3] Einziger expanded into the realm of video games when he and his bandmates worked on the soundtrack of the popular game Halo 2, writing a 26-minute song that also featured Flea on trumpet. In 2006 Einziger produced the debut album “Red Rover” by Agent Sparks; a collaboration with younger brothers Benjamin Einziger and Paul Fried. In 2007, Einziger produced Nighttiming, the debut album of long-time friend and former Phantom Planet drummer and actor Jason Schwartzman’s Coconut Records project.[4] The album featured appearances by Kirsten Dunst, Zooey Deschanel, and Robert Schwartzman, and was recorded at Einziger’s own home studio in Malibu, CA (Casa Chica).
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About Mixhalo: Mixhalo is a real-time audio platform that delivers an immersive experience for live events.
Ann Marie Simpson
Co-Founder & Co-Chairman of Mixhalo
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About Mixhalo: Mixhalo is a real-time audio platform that delivers an immersive experience for live events.
Prasad Akella
Founder, CSO, and Chairman of the Board of Drishti
Dr. Prasad Akella, founder and CEO of Drishti, has the distinction of creating two massive market categories that use technology to extend the limits on human capabilities. First, in the 1990s, Prasad led the General Motors team that built the world’s first collaborative robots (“cobots”, projected to be a $12B market by 2025). Then, in the early 2000s, as cofounder of the social networking pioneer Spoke, he envisioned and helped build the first massive social graph—a category that is now worth trillions. Prasad, today, is targeting his third category creation at Drishti. This time, he is working to combine the cognition of AI with the flexibility humans in factories.
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About Drishti: Drishti is a provider of AI-powered video analytics technology that gives visibility and insights for manual assembly line improvement.
Abraham King
Chairman and CEO of Immortal Machines
Abraham King is a co-Founder and CEO of Immortal Machines, a stealth mode startup headquartered in Palo Alto. Immortal Machines is building the next generation Cloud platform for Fortune 500 enterprises. Earlier, he was an entrepreneur in Aerospace and Defense working in partnership with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon. King’s prior work is used by the U.S. Navy to build mission critical integrity verification platforms in Submarine Combat Systems, and by the U.S. Air Force to build Situational Awareness Systems to autonomously manage real time complex networks of Space based assets and Ground Control Systems. King was one of the creators of CERN’s Planet scale Cloud platforms — the pioneering Cloud fabric behind Large Hadron Collider, spanning across forty nations — usage of which has resulted in multiple Nobel Prizes. He led the international group which created the original technology blueprint in the United States, and later held multiple leadership and executive roles. King began his career with U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories, Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, and European Organization for Nuclear Research — working on Artificial Intelligence, Planet scale Distributed Computing, Cryptography, and Supercomputing.
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About Immortal Machines: Immortal Machines is building the next generation Cloud platform for large enterprises and Fortune 500 corporations.
Eyal Shinar
Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Fundbox
Founder and Executive Chairman of Fundbox, Eyal is an expert in financial technology, AI and technology management. Prior to Fundbox, Eyal served as VP at Battery Ventures, leading projects and investments in finance, machine learning and SaaS. Notable examples are IDI Direct Insurance, Istra Research, Cortera, cVidya, Leadspace, Champions Oncology, Relay Foods, and Sportority. Prior to his work in Battery Ventures, Eyal was one of the first employees of Old Lane, a $5.5B NYC-based global hedge fund (later acquired by Citigroup) and also worked for Castle Harlan, a leading $6B NYC-based buyout firm. Eyal graduated from the special program for outstanding students at the Hebrew University with an LLB in Law and advanced degree in Finance. He earned his MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Eyal was recently recognized by Goldman Sachs as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2016 at its Builders + Innovators Summit.
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About Fundbox: Fundbox is an AI-powered financial platform for small businesses.
Fred Luddy
Chairman Of The Board Of Directors of ServiceNow
Fred founded Service-now.com in early 2004 and has served as Chief Executive and Technology Officer since inception. Prior to Service-now.com, Fred was employed at Peregrine Systems from 1990 to 2003 where he held the position of Chief Technology Officer (note that during that time Peregrine also owned the Remedy Corporation, subsequently sold to BMC). Prior to Peregrine, Fred founded Enterprise Software Associates (ESA), and worked at Boole and Babbage, and the Amdahl Corporation. His products are used by thousands of corporations worldwide and have generated revenue well in excess of one billion dollars. At the age of eighteen, his very first software program automated supply chain and maintenance purchasing processes for a business unit of American Standard. Later work involved writing an operating system competing with IBM’s mainframe offering, performance and management improvements to the IBM mainframe environment, a PC video conferencing / collaboration system, and UNIX / Linux based application development environments. Fred tried to attend Indiana University and Sir George Williams University, but found part-time programming for these institutions to be far more compelling than the classroom experience.
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About ServiceNow: ServiceNow provides cloud-based solutions that define, structure, manage, and automate services for enterprise operations.
Scott Scheper
Founder, Vice Chairman & CMO of XYO
Scott has worked on many exciting ventures with exceptionally talented people, including the Co-founder of Uber. Scott’s first “real boss” was Arie Trouw, who hired Scott in 2009 during an economic recession, when very few companies were hiring, and even fewer were starting companies. What began as a Facebook app startup with four guys and a ping pong table, grew to over 200 employees and 9-figures in revenue in less than two years. In 2013 Scott took a break from corporate life to pursue the dream of working remotely on a laptop while sipping tropical drinks on the beaches of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands (U.S.). During this period, Scott launched Greenlamp, a programmatic advertising agency specializing in direct-response media buying. The agency was fully automated; built entirely using algorithms to manage the campaigns. The team was built with project-basis software engineers, and had only one full-time employee: that being Scott. The advertising campaigns were managed by an automated system, nicknamed “Stewie” (Family Guy). 24-hours a day, Stewie managed everything, making automated tweaks to the advertising campaigns. He even emailed Scott to chat about the changes made (Stewie’s emails included signature Stewie lines). In its first year of operation, Greenlamp generated over $12M in revenue. When not working, Scott can be found reading books by his idols, Gary C. Halbert and Charlie Munger, or sometimes even outside with friends and family in San Diego, California.
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About XYO: XYO is a decentralized crypto-location oracle network aiming to provide accurate location data from cars to smartphones.
J.M Sawkat Akbar
Founder and Chairman of BJIT Group
Jem Akbar Shukat is the founder and Chairman of BJIT.
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About BJIT Group: BJIT Group is an information, communications, and ICT company that provides software development and information technology service.
Rustin Kretz
Founder, Chief Product Officer, Chairman of the Board of Scorpion
Rustin Kretz is the Founder, Chief Product Officer, and Chairman of the Board at Scorpion. Scorpion is the product of Rustin’s vision. His dedication and leadership have been the driving force behind Scorpion and the foundation for its unprecedented growth and innovative approach to digital marketing for local businesses since 2001.
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About Scorpion: Scorpion exists to better local small businesses and the communities they serve.
Walter Driver
Co-Founder, Chairman & Co-CEO of Scopely
Walter Driver is the co-founder, Chairman and co-Chief Executive Officer of Scopely, one of the fastest-growing mobile-first video game companies. Scopely creates and publishes a highly-diverse portfolio of top-grossing, immersive game experiences, including: the award-winning ”MARVEL Strike Force,” “Scrabble® GO,” “Star Trek™ Fleet Command” and”Yahtzee® With Buddies,” among others, which are played by hundreds of millions of players worldwide. Fueled by a world-class team, Scopely leverages its proprietary technology platform Playgami to bring directed-by-consumer, interactive experiences to audiences around the globe. Under Walter’s leadership, the company has achieved billions of dollars in lifetime revenue and attracted more than $1 billion in financing from leading venture capital firms, tech luminaries and cultural icons.
Walter has been recognized as one of the “100 Most Influential Young Executives” by The Business Journal, “Visionary of the Year” by C-Suite Quarterly, “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Ernst & Young, a “Young Global Shaper” by the World Economic Forum, one of the “100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs” by Goldman Sachs and a “Dealmaker of the Year” by Variety. Under Walter’s leadership, Scopely has also received many recognitions, including: “Best-led Company” in 2021 by Inc. magazine, “Private Company of the Year” in 2021 by Los Angeles Business Journal, a four time “Best Places to Work” winner by Built In LA, and a two time “World’s Most Innovative Companies” winner by Fast Company. Scopely has also been recognized on top charts such as Deloitte’s “Technology Fast 500,” being named the second fastest-growing technology company in North America and in the Top 10 mobile app charts for consumer spend.
Walter is an investor and advisor to many private technology companies as well as a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization and Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Los Angeles Technology & Innovation Council. Prior to Scopely, Walter founded and served as CEO of O Negative Media where he developed online social games. Before O Negative, he co-founded Ignition Interactive, one of the first developers of third-party applications for Facebook.
Walter holds a B.A. in English Literature from Brown University.
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About Scopely: Scopely is a global leader in interactive entertainment and mobile-first video games.
Vlad Shmunis
Founder, CEO, Chairman of RingCentral
Vlad Shmunis founded RingCentral in 1999 and launched RingCentral’s cloud business phone service in 2003. He developed the service based on the need he saw among businesses for an alternative to inflexible and expensive hardware-based phone systems. Since founding RingCentral, Shmunis has led the company in reimagining business communications. Today, the company empowers hundreds of thousands of businesses and their employees to work with unparalleled freedom and in imaginative new ways, via a wide variety of mobile and fixed line devices in traditional as well as dispersed work environments. Shmunis has more than 25 years of industry and management experience. Prior to launching RingCentral, he founded and served as the CEO of Ring Zero Systems, a desktop software communications company. After shipping more than 25 million copies of its Windows software through partnerships with leading PC manufacturers, Ring Zero Systems was acquired by Motorola. Shmunis was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2011 Northern California Award finalist. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from San Francisco State University, and is a named inventor in a number of U.S. patents.
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About RingCentral: RingCentral, a global distributor of cloud-unified communications and collaboration solutions, offers its users with technology services.
Nicolas Desmarais
Chairman & Co-CEO of AppDirect
Nicolas founded AppDirect in 2009 with Daniel Saks, and serves as AppDirect’s Chairman and Co-CEO. Nicolas is focused on the evolution of AppDirect’s product, investor relations, and overseeing the implementation of new marketplaces for our channel partners. Before co-founding AppDirect, Nicolas worked at Bain & Company as a management consultant focused on media and business services. Nicolas holds a bachelor’s degree with a double major in economics and political science from Amherst College. In his spare time, Nicolas enjoys outdoor activities and traveling to new countries.
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About AppDirect: AppDirect provides an end-to-end cloud commerce platform for both monetizing and managing digital customer relationships.
B.J. Cassin
Chairman of Capella
Mr. Cassin has been a venture capitalist for nearly 30 years. He was a financial founder in a number of public companies: Advanced Fibre Communications, Cadence Design Systems, Centex Telemanagement, Cerus Corporation, Endosonics Corporation, Equatorial Communications, Laserscope, Maxtor, Quantum Corporation, Quantum Health Resources, Racotek/Zamba, Scientific Microsystems, Stratacom, and Symphonix Devices. Financial founder in companies sold as private companies: CardioRhythm (Medtronic), Extricity (Peregrine Systems), Metricon (Johnson & Johnson), and Mountain Computer (Nakamichi). Before becoming a venture capitalist, Mr. Cassin co-founded Xidex Corporation in 1969, which achieved Fortune 500 status in 1987 with sales of $752 million and employing 7,000 worldwide. Mr. Cassin is Founder and Chairman of the Cassin Educational Initiative Foundation, launched in 2000, to establish private, college preparatory middle and high schools in economically-challenged communities throughout the country. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of Saint Mary’s College of California, serving as Chairman from 1995–1999. He also served for three years on the Advisory Board of the Business School of Santa Clara University and was a Director of the Daper Investment Fund at Stanford University. He currently serves on the Board of Cerus Corporation and several private companies. Mr. Cassin is Chairman of the Foundation for Nativity and Miguel Schools, a board member of the Cristo Rey Network and FADICA, and is a member of the California Jesuit Province Investment Committee. Mr. Cassin graduated from Holy Cross and is married, the father of five children, and resides in Los Altos Hills, California.
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About : Capella is a provider of wavelength selective switch technologies for use in ROADM’s and optical cross connects.
Dan Siroker
Co-Founder & Chairman of Optimizely
Dan Siroker is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Optimizely. The inspiration for Optimizely came from Dan’s work as the Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign and Deputy New Media Director for the Presidential Transition. Before Optimizely, Dan co-founded an online math game for kids called CarrotSticks. Formerly, he was also a Product Manager for Google Chrome and AdWords. Dan graduated with Honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in Computer Science.
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About Optimizely: Optimizely is a platform that provides digital experience solutions.
Jay Fulcher
Chairman & CEO of Zenefits
Jay is Chairman & CEO at Zenefits, a leading cloud HCM & Benefits platform focused on providing comprehensive HR, Performance, Benefits, Payroll, Time and Compliance solutions for SMB and mid-market companies. Zenefits has more than 11,000 customers across the US and leverages an impressive list of marketplace partners including Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Slack, Uber, Asana plus dozens of others. Zenefits is an acknowledged disruptive and innovative force for helping to facilitate the changing nature of work and helping to level the playing field for SMB companies. Jay’s CEO experience includes both public and private technology companies (Zenefits, Agile, Ooyala). After its IPO in 1999, Agile was acquired by Oracle in 2007. Ooyala was acquired by Telstra in 2015. Before his years as a CEO, Jay served in senior executive roles at PeopleSoft, Red Pepper and SAP. Jay is an advisor to and investor in a broad portfolio of tech companies focused on media, enterprise, education, retail, and healthcare. Over the last 20+ years Jay has served as a director at more than a dozen public and private companies. Jay is currently an advisor at iSport360, Momentum Partners, League Network and San Jose State University’s Lucas Graduate School and College of Business. He currently sits on the boards of Zenefits, AirPR and Splice Machine.
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About Zenefits: Zenefits delivers a complete, all-mobile HR experience for small and medium businesses.
Martin Dieck
Executive Chairman of Cerebrotech Medical Systems
Martin Dieck is the Chairman of Synchron & Executive Chairman of Cerebrotech Medical.
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About Cerebrotech Medical Systems, ePlanet Capital, Lazarus Effect, Neurotechnology Investors, Synchron: Cerebrotech Medical Systems develops novel technologies for the non-invasive monitoring of patients after strokes and brain injuries.
Peter Van Camp
Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Equinix
Peter Van Camp has served as the Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors at Equinix since April 2007. Prior to becoming Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, Peter served as Equinix’s Chief Executive Officer and as a Member of the Board of Directors since May 2000 and as President since March 2006. In addition, in December 2005, Peter was re-elected as Chairman of the Board of Directors, having previously served in that capacity from June 2001 to December 2002. From January 1997 to May 2000, Peter was employed at UUNET, the Internet division of MCI (formerly known as WorldCom), where he served as President of Internet Markets and as President of the Americas region. During the period from May 1995 to January 1997, Peter was President of Compuserve Network Services, an Internet access provider. Before holding this position, Peter held various positions at Compuserve, Inc. during the period from October 1982 to May 1995.
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About : Equinix is an internet company that provides data center services for companies, businesses, and organizations.
Gaurav Dhillon
Chairman & CEO of SnapLogic
Gaurav Dhillon is currently the Chairman and CEO of cloud connection company, SnapLogic. An early investor in SnapLogic, Gaurav Dhillon joined as CEO in 2009 to help realize the potential of its cloud and on-premise integration products, strategy, and unique business model. He is spearheading the company’s rapid growth and manages its financing, products, strategic relationships, and operations. As former CEO of Informatica Corporation, (Nasdaq; INFA) a data integration company that he co-founded in 1992, Gaurav led it from a startup idea to a leading worldwide software enterprise – ultimately forging a broad acceptance of the vision he pioneered. Prior to Informatica, Gaurav held management and engineering positions at Sterling Software and Unisys Corp.
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About SnapLogic: SnapLogic is a software company that provides a platform for enterprise cloud and big data integration.
David Richards
Founder, Chairman, President & CEO of WANdisco
David is CEO, President and co-founder of WANdisco and has quickly established WANdisco as one of the world’s most promising technology companies. Since co-founding the company in Silicon Valley in 2005, David has led WANdisco on a course for rapid international expansion, opening offices in the UK, Japan and China. David spearheaded the acquisition of Altostor, which accelerated the development of WANdisco’s first products for the Big Data market. The majority of WANdisco’s core technology is now produced out of the company’s flourishing software development base in David’s hometown of Sheffield, England and in Belfast, Northern Ireland. David has become recognised as a champion of British technology and entrepreneurship. In 2012, he led WANdisco to a hugely successful listing on London Stock Exchange (WAND:LSE), raising over £24m to drive business growth. With over 15 years’ executive experience in the software industry, David sits on a number of advisory and executive boards of Silicon Valley start-up ventures. A passionate advocate of entrepreneurship, he has established many successful start-up companies in Enterprise Software and is recognised as an industry leader in Enterprise Application Integration and its standards. David is a frequent commentator on a range of business and technology issues, appearing regularly on Bloomberg and CNBC. Profiles of David have appeared in a range of leading publications including the Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.
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About WANdisco: WANdisco, the world leader in Active Data Replication™, enables the replication of continuously changing data to different environments.
Aart Geus
Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO of Synopsys
Since co-founding Synopsys in 1986, Aart de Geus has expanded Synopsys from a start-up synthesis enterprise to the world leader in electronic design automation.
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About Synopsys, Tinfoil Security: Synopsys is the Silicon to Software partner for companies that develop electronic products and software applications.
Brad D. Smith
Executive Chairman of Intuit
Brad D. Smith is the former CEO and current executive chairman of Intuit Inc., co-founder of The Wing 2 Wing Foundation, chairman of Nordstrom’s board and sits on the board of directors of Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey). Smith’s journey with Intuit began in 2003, when he joined the company as vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Accountant Central and Developer Network in Plano, Texas. After three years in this role, Smith became the senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Small Business Division and was responsible for the small business division’s product offerings, which included QuickBooks, Quicken and Payroll. In 2008, Brad D. Smith became Intuit’s CEO and held the position for 11 years. During his time as CEO, Smith transitioned the company from its original desktop financial software offerings to a global, cloud-based product and platform company. This move is widely considered his greatest accomplishment with the company. In 2019, Smith stepped down from his post as CEO, transitioning the position to Intuit’s current CEO, Sasan Goodarzi. Shortly after stepping down, Smith co-founded The Wing 2 Wing Foundation with his wife, Alys. Each from small hometowns (Brad is from Kenova, West Virginia and Alys is from Akron, Ohio), the pair wanted to create economic opportunity and resources for young entrepreneurs. The organization’s goal is to advance the great equalizers of education and entrepreneurship in regions where individuals and communities have been overlooked and underserved. In doing so, they strive to champion human dignity and unleash human potential. Before Intuit, Smith was the senior vice president of Marketing and Business Development at ADP. Smith also held various sales, marketing and general management positions with Pepsi, 7-Up, and ADVO, Inc. Smith earned a master’s degree in management from Aquinas College in Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Marshall University in West Virginia. In an effort to give back to the community that built him, Smith and his wife started a $10 million scholarship fund at Marshall, and gifted $25 million to the university’s schools of business. The Smith family has also given West Virginia University a $25 million donation through their Wing 2 Wing foundation. Today, Brad D. Smith lives in Menlo Park, California with his family.
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About Intuit, Wing 2 Wing Foundation: Intuit offers business and financial management solutions for SMBs, financial institutions, consumers, and accounting professionals.
Sushil Garg
Chairman of Birchstreet Systems
Sushil Garg is the founder, Chairman and CEO of BirchStreet. As a hands-on entrepreneur, over the past 40 years Sushil has founded, run and sold a number of successful software businesses. Throughout his career, he has been regarded as a leader and visionary whose ideas, products and expertise have been on the cutting edge of the software industry. Today, Sushil is fully engaged in guiding BirchStreet forward, while maintaining close relationships with our major customers. From an early age, Sushil’s innovative ambition led him to develop and grow numerous businesses. In 1982, he founded Pro Computer Sciences (PCS), where he created the PRO IV development language. PRO IV was the first object-oriented, fourth-generation language to bring open architecture and real-time programming to business application development. PCS was sold to a leading technology company in the mid-1980’s. Starting In 1987, Sushil built a successful consulting services firm, GDI, that focused on PRO IV development projects and was ultimately sold to one of the “big four” advertising and marketing services companies in 1999. On the heels of his GDI success, Sushil founded Sagence Systems to convert his J4 language into an application development platform for the newly emerging multi-tenant, cloud-based market, also known as SaaS, focusing on the accounting and supply chain market. Seeing an opportunity to play a major role in significantly improving the procure-to-pay (P2P) business processes in the hospitality industry, Sushil founded BirchStreet Systems in 2002. As with many of his former ventures, BirchStreet has grown into the global leader for the enterprise application suite used to manage his targeted vertical. His strong entrepreneurial drive, technological insights and customer intimacy are key elements of BirchStreet’s culture and its success.
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About Birchstreet Systems: BirchStreet Systems, Inc. designs and delivers a Web-based procure-to-pay platform to hotels, assisted living facilities, country clubs,
Aasim Saied
Chairman & CEO of Akyumen Industries Corp.
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About Akyumen Industries Corp.: Non-Profit
Gabrielle Rios
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of TRUINJECT
Gabrielle Rios is the founder and CEO of TRUINJECT.
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About Stanford University Graduate School of Business, TRUINJECT: TRUINJECT™ is a software company focused on the innovation, development & commercialization of medical products for the injectable market.
Giovanni Colella, M.D.
Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of OODA Health
Giovanni is the Executive CHairman and Co-Founder of OODA Health. Before OODA, he co-founded Castlight Health in 2008 with Todd Park and served as CEO of the company until 2017. Before co-founding Castlight, Giovanni was founder, president, and CEO of RelayHealth (acquired by McKesson in 2006), a pioneering healthcare company that provides secure digital communications to connect doctors with their patients. Giovanni has also served in senior roles at Sapient and SAI and was a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. Before beginning his business career, he practiced medicine in Manhattan and is a board-certified psychiatrist. Giovanni graduated with an MD from the Universita Degli Studi di Milano in Italy. He completed his fellowship in public psychiatry at Columbia University, and earned his MBA from Columbia Business School.
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About Brightline, OODA Health: OODA Health is a healthcare technology company that offers a software billing platform for providers, payers, patients, and insurers.
Osman Rashid
CEO & Chairman of Convo
Osman is a seasoned entrepreneur in the field of educational technology. He is currently the CEO of Convo Corp. and Founder & CEO of **Galxyz** , an intergalactic science adventure on a mission to ignite the fascination of science and unlock the true potential in every student. Previously he was the co-founder and CEO of online textbook rental leader **Chegg** (NYSE:CHGG) until early 2010, and also co-founder and CEO of **Kno, Inc.** (acquired by Intel in 2013), a digital education platform company. He is also on the Board of Trustees at a health focused non-profit, ChildLife Foundation, which provides urgent care to the poorest in Karachi, Pakistan. CLF runs Karachi’s largest children emergency rooms and is deploying satellite urgent care centers to provide critical care and prevention education. Osman has received several honors, including Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of The Year Award (CA) in 2009, which is the world’s most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs, as well as Forbes Impact 15 for 2012 and Inc.’s Immigrant Edge: 9 Wildly Successful Entrepreneurs. To find out more about Osman, check out his LinkedIn profile. You can also follow him on Twitter @osmanrashid.
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About Convo, Galxyz: Convo provides an enterprise social collaboration platform that enables easy, secure conversations between desk/non-desk workers.
Wendell Brown
CEO & Chairman of Averon
Wendell Brown is the CEO, Chairman and co-founder of Averon. He is a prolific innovator whose creative triumphs include building a global VoIP solution (acquired by Microsoft), founding America’s largest online voicemail platform solution (acquired by AOL), and co-founding Liveops, America’s largest virtual work-at-home call center (honored by the White House in 2010), all of which contribute to the advancement of technology and betterment of society. Wendell is proud of his unique blend of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and West Virginia roots, where his family tree dates back to the Mayflower era. After enjoying his upbringing in the northernmost Appalachian town of Oneonta, he attended Cornell University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. Wendell then followed his dreams to Silicon Valley, initially gaining success as a popular video game designer (including blockbuster hits such as Star Wars, Beauty & The Beast, and Nova Blast) and soon thereafter he created the first C-compiler for Mac. Later, as the creator of one of the world’s first mass-market cybersecurity products, WalkSoftly (acquired by Intel), then as a pioneer of work-at-home call centers (Liveops), which greatly increase employment opportunities for veterans and workers with disabilities, and today as the leader of Averon, Wendell’s innovations continue to empower and improve the lives of countless people around the world. He enjoys participating as a speaker, tech judge and advisor in a wide range of communities including the World Economic Forum, DLD Munich & Tel Aviv, XPRIZE, Burning Man, TED, the MITA Tech Talks and more. Wendell is a licensed private pilot, and has been active in the development of new airplane and electric vehicle designs. A strong believer in giving back, he’s created scholarships for underprivileged students, and is a proud founding member of the Human Rights Campaign. In his (rare) spare time, Wendell enjoys international explorations, having visited more than 30 countries as of 2019, and spending quality time at home with his treasured family including beloved Italian greyhound, Magic.
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About Averon: Averon is the developer of the Direct Autonomous Authentication (DAA), the first fully automatic, secure mobile identity standard
Christian Lanng
Co-Founder & Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Tradeshift
Christian Lanng is founder of Tradeshift.com. Previously he was Head of the Center for Service oriented Infrastructure in the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency. Christian has 10 years of experience working with mobile-services, e-business, SOA and large scale payment systems. He managed the roll-out of service oriented infrastructure in the Danish public sector and supervised the next generation of SOA e-business infrastructure for all Danish companies and the public sector. He is an active member of a number of European e-business and infrastructure initiatives. He holds a bachelor degree in Sociology and is currently writing his master on emergent social systems.
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About The World Economic Forum, Tradeshift: Tradeshift is a cloud-based business network connecting buyers and suppliers.
Shan Sinha
Founder, Exec Chairman, Board Member of Highfive
Shan Sinha is the CEO and Co-Founder of Highfive. He co-founded Highfive with the vision of making every conversation at work face-to-face. Prior to Highfive, Shan was the Group Product Manager for Google Apps for Enterprise. Shan joined Google via acquisition in 2010 after Google bought his collaboration company, DocVerse, which later became part of Google Drive. Shan founded DocVerse in 2007 after leaving his role as Product Manager for Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server. Shan graduated from MIT with a Masters and Bachelors in Computer Science, where he conducted research in network systems and performance. Highfive is Shan’s fourth startup company.
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About : Highfive simplifies business collaboration with a conferencing platform that builds connected cultures.
Lee Daley
Co-Founder, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, and Chairman of Hello Genius
Lee Daley currently works as Chairman, Co-Founder, and Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Hello Genius. He previously worked at McCann Worldgroup as Chief Strategy Officer EMEA, WW Head of Strategic Planning, Knowledge and Innovation, and Global Board Director.
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About Hello Genius: Hello Genius is an app-based learning system that connects parents and children through personalized learning experiences.
David Kelso
Founder, CTO & Chairman of Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing)
David is a former YC founder, Ember.js contributor, and experienced developer. He has built & maintained products used by millions of customers daily.
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About Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing): #1 Revenue Management Solution for Short-Term Rental Managers and Owners to Get, Grow, and Keep Revenue
Jared Heyman
Chairman of CrowdMed
Jared Heyman joined Rebel Fund as Managing Partner in 2019.Jared’s sister Carly was the inspiration behind CrowdMed, after suffering for 3 years from a rare undiagnosed disease. Jared is the company’s CEO and product visionary, determining the strategic direction of the company and product. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Texas at Austin in Business Honors and Marketing, plus the Y Combinator accelerator program. Jared is a 15-year internet tech veteran whose previous company, Infosurv, is still an active multi-million dollar success.
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About CrowdMed, Infosurv, Rebel Fund: CrowdMed provides prediction market technology using the collective intelligence of ‘medical detectives’ to produce diagnostic suggestions.
Chuck Robbins
Chairman & CEO of Cisco
As CEO, Robbins leads an Executive Leadership Team focused on Ciscos vision to change the way the world works, lives, plays and learns. Under his leadership, Cisco is empowering its customers to create and deliver value as every country, city and company becomes digital. In his previous role as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations for Cisco, Robbins led the company’s Worldwide Sales and Partner Organizations, and helped drive and execute many of the companys investment areas and strategy shifts. He also sponsored the security and collaboration businesses at the executive level and was a key champion for the Sourcefire and Meraki acquisitions.
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About Cisco: Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, telecommunications equipment, and other technology services and products.
Cameron Teitelman
Founder, Chairman, and head of admissions and oversee investment vehicles of StartX (Stanford-StartX Fund)
Cameron Teitelman is the Founder and Chairman of StartX, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit that runs an accelerator for Stanford affiliated entrepreneurs. Under his management, StartX has supported more than 1,100+ founders building 500+ companies. StartX companies have raised over $3.3B to date. In 2013, the Stanford-StartX Fund was launched. To date, SSF has invested in 250 StartX companies across 400+ rounds, investing $130 million in capital.
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About StartX (Stanford-StartX Fund): StartX is an educational non-profit that helps Stanford’s top entrepreneurs.
Aaron Contorer
Chairman of FP Complete
Aaron is a former executive of Microsoft, where he served as program manager for distributed systems and general manager of Visual C++, the leading software development tool at that time. He architected MSN’s move to Internet-based server software, served as the full-time technology adviser to Bill Gates, and founded and ran the company’s Productivity Tools Team for complex software engineering projects. Before founding FP Complete, he served as CTO at Web analytics firm Mentico, optimization firm Hynomics, and secure election systems firm Everyone Counts.
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About CONTORER FOUNDATION, FP Complete, Greatscale Ventures: FP Complete develops Haskell software tools and services for programmers to accelerate time-to-market and increase product quality.
Phil Tee
Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO and Herd Leader of Moogsoft
Phil Tee is Chairman and CEO of Moogsoft. He made an indelible mark in information technology by co-founding Omnibus Transport Technologies Limited (OTT) in 1993 to build and market Netcool/Omnibus. OTT was folded into Micromuse (Nasdaq: MUSE) in 1994 and Netcool/Omnibus became the company’s flagship product. This technology continues to be the in the core of the management support systems in the world’s largest networks in the form of IBM Tivoli Netcool. In 1997, Phil founded Riversoft (LSE: RSFT) to solve the problem of root cause analysis; the technology acquired by Micromuse and the software subsequently became part of the IBM Tivoli Netcool suite. Phil then went on to lead Njini, producing a revolutionary and early data and storage software layer with data de-duplication and information lifecycle management (ILM) capabilities. The company’s technology was acquired by Riverbed (Nasdaq:RVBD). In 2008, Phil founded Promethyan to gestate multiple startups concurrently. Two Promethyan children of note include Prelert and RiverMuse.
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About Moogsoft: Moogsoft is a provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter.
Sreekanth Ravi
Co-Founder & Chairman of RSquared AI
Sreekanth Ravi is the Co-Founder & Chairman at RSquared AI.
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About RSquared AI: RSquared AI is a cloud-based AI platform that evaluates the firms culture and state and provides actionable insights through dashboard.
Guerrino De Luca
Chairman of the Board of Directors of Logitech
As Logitech’s chairman, Guerrino Luca supervises the company’s strategy and performance. De Luca joined Logitech as president and chief executive officer in early 1998, and became a member of the board of directors a few months later. During this tenure as Logitech’s chief executive officer from 1998 to 2008, the company posted nine consecutive years of record sales and profits as its annual revenue grew from $400 million to more than $2.1 billion, and its operating income grew from $16 million to more than $230 million. Since 2008, De Luca has served solely as chairman of the board, except from July 2011 through December 2012, when he resumed the executive leadership role prior to turning it over to Bracken P. Darrell January 2013. A technology-industry veteran with more than thirty years of European and U.S. experience, De Luca has an extensive background in product strategy, marketing and management. Prior to joining Logitech, De Luca served as executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Apple. He was president of Claris Corporation, a U.S. personal computing software vendor, after having served in various marketing positions with Apple in the United States and Europe. He began his career at Olivetti in Ivrea, Italy. De Luca holds a B.S. degree in electronic engineering from the University of Rome, Italy.
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About : Logitech designs and manufactures personal peripherals for the needs of personal computer and laptop users.
Bahram Nour-Omid
Executive Chairman of Fuel Cycle
Bahram Nour-Omid is the Board Member at APERIO.
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About Adly, Fuel Cycle: Fuel Cycle’s Market Research Cloud integrates human insight with critical business data for actionable intelligence.
Santanov Chaudhuri
Co Founder and Executive Chairman of HST
An avid solar enthusiast, Santanov Chaudhuri is a co-founder of HST Solar. Santanov brings specific experience as a former solar power developer himself. He founded one of the first solar power developers active in one of South Asia’s solar power tariff schemes and led the process of trying to procure the right tracking and racking systems to boost IRRs. He founded HST Solar in the hopes of creating a technology company that could solve the need in the market that he had faced personally. He has executed over $100m in renewable energy transactions and investments globally, including in the US, Europe and Brazil. Previously he served as a banker at Goldman Sachs, where he worked on several pioneering clean energy transactions among other deals. He brings experience as a Venture Capitalist at Trivella Investimentos S.A., and as an energy hedge fund investor at Davidson Kempner Capital, a $12B hedge fund. He also brings experience working for NASA from his time at the GOODS project. Chaudhuri holds a BS from Yale University and a MBA from the Harvard Business School.
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About HST: We drive the world forward towards its clean energy future.
Ray Grieselhuber
Chairman & Founder of GinzaMetrics
Ray Grieselhuber is the founder of Ginzamarkets, and creator of Ginzametrics. Ray has built marketing and advertising systems for the last five years, helping clients such as Proctor & Gamble, Intel, Kakaku.com and Cisco scale their online campaigns to global markets, cut costs and increase sales. Before founding Ginzametrics, he ran Firewatching Media, K.K., in Tokyo, Japan. Before that, he was the Chief Architect and Director of Product Development at Covario, Inc. in San Diego, CA., an award-winning Inc. 500 company.
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About DemandMarkets, DemandSphere, GinzaMetrics, Gridjit: GinzaMetrics offers an SEO and content marketing platform that provides recommendations and competitor analytics to agencies and marketers.
David Hindawi
Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Tanium
David Hindawi is CEO and Chairman of the Board of Tanium Inc., a Berkeley-based enterprise software company. An accomplished entrepreneur and inventor, Hindawi holds a number of software patents. In 1997 he founded a leading systems management company, BigFix, Inc., with the mission of making enterprise desktops, laptops and servers run more securely and efficiently. BigFix was acquired by IBM in 2010. Prior to founding BigFix, Hindawi held several executive management roles, including serving as CEO of Software Ventures, a market leader in telecommunications software. Hindawi founded Software Ventures and led the company to its acquisition. Hindawi holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Industrial and Management Engineering from the Technion, and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley.
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About Tanium: Tanium is a security and systems management platform allowing real-time data collection at an enterprise scale.
Tim O’Reilly
Founder, Chairman & CEO of O’Reilly
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc. Considered by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world, O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Strata: The Business of Data, the Velocity Conference on Web Performance and Operations, and many others. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O’Reilly’s early stage venture firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online, PeerJ, Code for America, and Maker Media, which was recently spun out from O’Reilly Media. Maker Media’s Maker Faire has been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution.
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About O’Reilly, Oreilly AlphaTech Ventures, Oreilly AlphaTech Ventures, POPVOX: O’Reilly provides technology and business training, knowledge, and insight to help companies succeed.
Henry Halimi
Co-Founder, Chairman of Flo Technologies
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About Flo Technologies: Flo prevents water damage and unnecessary water waste in homes with its Flo by Moen smart home water monitoring and leak protection system.
Evan Powell
CEO & Chairman of MayaData
Evan has help found and grow a number of eventually important infrastructure software companies. He joined MayaData as an investor and Chairman in early 2017 and as CEO in July of 2017. Evan Powell was previously co-founder and CEO of StackStorm (BRCD), an operations automation software provider. Before that Evan was founding Chief Executive Officer of Nexenta Systems, and helped create the software defined storage market and achieved over $350 million of annual partner sales. Before Nexenta Evan was founding CEO of Clarus Systems (RVBD) which was a leading provider of IP Communications test and management software. Evan previously co-founded Clarus Systems, the leading provider of enterprise software for the management of next generation, real time communications. Clarus customers and partners include IBM, HP, JPMC, EDS, Bank of America and Cisco. The company was purchased by OPNET (OPNT) and is now a division of Riverbed (RVBD).
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About CloudByte, MayaData, OpenEBS: MayaData drives data agility by removing barriers to the adoption of stateful workloads in highly agile Kubernetes environments.
Moti Rafalin
CEO, Founder and Chairman of vFunction
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About vFunction: VFunction allows enterprises to tackle application modernization and accelerate digital transformation.
Ram Varadarajan
Founder, Chairman and CEO of Acalvio Technologies
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About Acalvio Technologies: Acalvio provides Advanced Threat Defense (ATD) solutions to detect, engage, and respond to malicious activity inside the perimeter.
Charles Giancarlo
CEO & Chairman of Pure Storage
Charles Giancarlo has served on the Vectra Networks board of directors since April 2014 and was previously an advisor to the company. Giancarlo is a Senior Advisor to Silver Lake Partners and was previously Managing Director and Head of Value Creation. He previously served as a senior executive at Cisco Systems, most recently as executive vice president and chief development officer. At Cisco, he led the company’s overall product development and management activities and was responsible for over 80 percent of the company’s revenue. Giancarlo serves on the boards of Accenture, Arista, Blue Jeans Network, Imperva, ItsOn, ServiceNow and Soraa, and is the chairman of the board of Avaya. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Brown University where he serves on the board of trustees, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley where he serves on the board of advisors, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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About Pure Storage: Pure Storage is an all-flash enterprise storage company that enables broad deployment of flash in data centers.
Braden Kelly
Chairman of the Board of Directors of FICO
Braden Kelly has served as a Member of the Board of Directors at Censeo Health, LLC since 2013. Braden is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors at FICO since February 2016 and has served as a Member of the Board of Directors since February 12, 2013. While a Partner and Managing Director at General Atlantic, a global $17 billion private equity investment firm, Braden originated and ran the firm’s global health care practice; founded the firm’s Silicon Valley office; and was on the firm’s investment committee. During his 12 year tenure, Braden was responsible for managing investments in the U.S., Europe and India. At Morgan Stanley & Co., Braden was an Investment Banker in the mergers, acquisitions and restructuring department.
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About : Fair Isaac Corporation enables businesses to automate, improve, and connect decisions to enhance business performance.
Samir Hanna
Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Oqton
Samir Hanna is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Oqton.
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About Oqton: Oqton is a software company that develops AI-driven software for the manufacturing industry.
Rory Cutaia
Founder, Chairman, Pres. & CEO of VERB Technology Company
Rory originated the concept of bBooth and the idea that it could be used as a revenue-generating casting vehicle for TV shows. Rory created the Company’s business plan and marketing strategies, financed its start-up costs, including all research and development, then assembled a world-class management team of successful Hollywood, entertainment, and technology veterans to execute his vision to disrupt the talent discovery and fan engagement industries. Keenly focused on building shareholder value, Rory provides the vision and leadership for his management team and sets the goals and objectives for the Company’s growth and expansion. A successful serial entrepreneur, Rory’s previous endeavors include Founder, Chairman and CEO of telecom technology icon, The Telx Group, which he built and sold in 6 years for approx. $250M, returning 18x invested capital to early investors; and Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Allied Fiber, a new nationwide fiber-optic network, being deployed along railroad rights-of-way; among other successful endeavors.
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About VERB Technology Company: VERB Technology Company specializes in business-focused interactive video webinars, CRM, sales, and marketing applications.
Jedidiah Yueh
Founder ,Executive Chairman & CEO of Delphix
In 1999, Jedidiah Yueh founded Avamar, a software company that pioneered data de-duplication and shipped a billion-dollar product in the backup and recovery industry, with over 20,000 current customers. Today, de-duplication is a high priority for enterprise data centers, and the technology has become a must-have feature or product for major storage and software vendors. Data de-duplication strips away redundant data to make disks more cost effective than tape media for storing a wide variety of data types, such as daily, repeated backup sets. EMC acquired Avamar in November 2006 for $165 million. EMC executives have stated that Avamar is the best performing investment for EMC since VMware.Yueh has demonstrated a successful track record for identifying new market opportunities and staying ahead of industry trends. As VP of Product Management at EMC, Yueh helped launch the Avamar Data Store and the Avamar Virtual Edition in 2007, two innovative and successful products that have helped EMC maintain a leadership position in the industry. Prior to Avamar, Yueh served as Chief Operating Officer for NTD, an optical storage startup. He brings over a decade of experience in the software and data storage industries and has more than 6 patents or patents pending. Yueh graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude with an AB from Harvard University. Under former President George H. Bush, he was designated a US Presidential Scholar, one of the highest academic achievements awarded nationally.
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About Delphix: Delphix provides an intelligent data platform that accelerates digital transformation for companies around the world.
Tom Proulx
Chairman of 1047 Games
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About 1047 Games, QuickBooks: Splitgate is an operator of a remote video game developer studio.
Farhan Ahmad
Founder & Executive Chairman of Bento for Business
Farhan Ahmad is the Founder of Bento Corporation and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Ahmad served as Managing Director at Barclays and Global Head of Emerging Payments and Prepaid for Discover Financial Services. He held significant leadership roles at JPMorgan Chase, Bank One and FirstUSA. His passion has always been with small companies. He built 2 successful businesses: Chase HealthAdvance, an independent healthcare business within JPMorgan Chase and Aceva Technologies. He was able to build elegant solutions that replaced unnecessarily complex products. He is excited to make financial services easier and more powerful for small businesses. He holds a Bachelors degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
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About Bento for Business: Bento offers a complete B2B payments solution that helps SMBs gain full control and visibility over their cash on one platform
Adam Pisoni
Founder & Executive Chairman of Abl Schools
Adam started Abl to help all schools move beyond the 20th century model of education. Two and a half decades after dropping out of high school, he returned to the field of education to rethink the structure of school as we know it. His career has been focused on helping organizations become more agile and responsive, and now he brings this expertise to schools. Prior to Abl, Adam co-founded Yammer in 2008, ultimately creating one of the fastest growing SaaS companies of all time. He oversaw product, analytics, and engineering, scaling the company to 500 employees until Yammer sold to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 Billion. To clear his head, Adam also enjoys long bike rides, backpacking, and rock climbing.
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About Abl Schools: Abl Schools is building a new kind of school operations software that helps school leaders better manage their time and resources.
Kevin Roberts
Chairman of the Board of Cyberhull
Kevin J Roberts joined the highly experienced founding team of CyberHULL in April 2009 as CEO and Chairman. Kevin has 35 years of experience in the High Tech Industry in both public and private companies. He started his business career in 1973 with McDonnell Douglas Information Systems Group and during his 14 yrs with the company annual revenue grew from $20 million to $1.4 billion. Kevin served in a number of senior management positions directing major software and services development contracts for the Health Care, Telecommunications, CAD/CAM, Consumer Electronics, Chemical / Pharmaceutical, Financial and Aerospace markets . Kevin joined Biosym Technologies in 1988 as SVP of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Customer Support and was promoted to CEO of Biosym in 1990. Biosym, under his leadership became the number one Molecular Modeling Software company in the world and was sold to Corning Inc in 1992 for $108 million. In 1995 Kevin helped launch SeQual Technologies Inc as Chairman and CEO. SeQual today is a leading worldwide supplier of home health care Oxygen Concentrators. Kevin served as Chairman and CEO of Azron Inc. ( Electronic Medical Records Software ) and completed Azron’s merger with a private Chicago based health care organization. Kevin was a Board member and lead angel investor in Akos /Endonetics Inc. ). Endonetics was sold to Medtronics in 2001 for $67 million. Kevin became a Board member and helped launch Reaction Design Inc which today is leading the way towards development of Clean Technology for the transportation and energy sector. He has served on the Board of Optical Research Associates(ORA) in Pasadena Ca. from 1999 until present. Kevin was invited to become a non executive Board member for Superscape Plc in 1997( London Stock Exchange Listed ) and then asked to take over as CEO of Superscape in 1999. After leading several successful funding rounds on the London Exchange for Superscape Kevin and his team re engineered the company from a 3D Graphics Tool Company into a Mobile Games Publishing Company and took Superscape from a position of number 91 to number 5 in the North American market before selling the company to Glu Mobile in April of 2008 for $36 million. Kevin also serves today on the Board of ScienceMedia Inc and as an advisor to the Board of Skinit.com.
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About : Cyberhull is an IT company that has teams of outsourced software and programming development and involves in data transformation and more.
Hosein Khajeh Hosseiny
Founder & Executive Chairman of Trinity AgTech
Dr. Khajeh-Hosseiny is a British private equity investor, venture capitalist and philanthropist. He is a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company on innovation, growth and transformation; a Board Trustee of the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, and founder and CEO of Open X Innovations LLC, an asset management firm. He served as Managing Director, Managing Partner and CEO of Northgate Capital from 2004 to 2018. Prior to Northgate, Dr. Khajeh-Hosseiny served as Head of Global Private Equity Investments at the McKinsey Investment Office (“MIO”), an organization with $10 billion under management and a wholly owned subsidiary of McKinsey & Company. Prior to MIO, Dr. Khajeh-Hosseiny was a senior management consultant with the Private Equity and Asset Management Practices of McKinsey & Company. While at McKinsey, he advised top global and European investment firms and government agencies on their respective investment strategies and capabilities; advised top global and European investment firms on acquisitions, alliances, and restructurings; and co-led McKinsey’s Excellence in U.S. and European Private Equity Initiative. He is a frequent speaker at, and has served as chairman for, certain leading industry events on private equity, and risk management. I Dr. Khajeh-Hosseiny holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Econometrics from Cambridge University. From Cambridge University he also received an honorary research position and lectured on research methods, finance, and investments.
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About Open X Innovations, Trinity AgTech: Trinity AgTech is delivering analytical software for the agriculture sector.
Ross A. Jaffe
Co-Founder and Chairman of Faro Health
Ross Jaffe is the Co-Founder and Chairman at Faro Health.
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About Faro Health, Versant Ventures, Vital Therapies: Faro Health is a company that handles the tedious work better left for a computer.
Charles Liang
Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Supermicro
Charles Liang founded Supermicro and has served as our President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board since our inception in September 1993. Mr. Liang has been developing server system architectures and technologies for the past two decades. From July 1991 to August 1993, Mr. Liang was President and Chief Design Engineer of Micro Center Computer Inc., a high-end motherboard design and manufacturing company. From January 1988 to April 1991, Mr. Liang was Senior Design Engineer and Project Leader for Chips & Technologies, Inc., a chipset technology company, and Suntek Information International Group, a system and software development company. Mr. Liang has been granted many server technology patents. Mr. Liang holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University of Science & Technology in Taiwan.
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About Supermicro: Supermicro is a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and innovation.
Adrian Ionel
CEO, Co-founder & Chairman of Mirantis
Adrian Ionel is the CEO of Mirantis, and its co-founder as an OpenStack company. He joined in 2009 and initiated the company’s investment in OpenStack in 2010. Since then the company grew from five to over one hundred customers, becoming the OpenStack market leader and one of the most respected brands in cloud infrastructure. Adrian leads Mirantis’ vision and strategy, and the company’s overall development rooted in a culture of customer intimacy, engineering excellence and risk taking as its foundation for long-term prosperity.Prior to Mirantis Adrian was CEO, Chairman and co-founder of eOnline, (now part of Xerox), VP and General Manager EMEA at Qualys (NASDAQ: QLYS) and Venture Partner at Trident Capital. He earned a MSEE degree from the University of Erlagen-Nuernberg and spent his early years in R&D and product management. A Romanian by birth Adrian lived in the UK, Germany and Japan and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995. Outside work he loves trail runs, power yoga, spending time with family and the occasional mountain biking ride.
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About Mirantis: Mirantis helps organizations ship code faster on public and private clouds. We provide a public cloud experience on any infrastructure.
Steve Soboroff
Board Member and Chairman of Macerich
Steve Soboroff is the President of the Los Angeles Police Commission and has served in that position since his appointment to the Board of Police Commissioners by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti in August of 2013. Since 1978, he has been the managing partner of Soboroff Partners, a shopping center development and leasing company. During 2001 to 2010, he served in the roles of Chairman and CEO as well as President of Playa Vista, one of the country’s most significant multi-use real estate projects. Mr. Soboroff also was President of the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission from 1995 to 2001 and a member of the Los Angeles Harbor Commission. In addition, Mr. Soboroff is a board member of several non-profit philanthropic and academic organizations.
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About : Macerich is an independent real estate investment trust headquartered in Santa Monica, California.
Dana Anderson
Vice Chairman of Macerich
Dana Anderson is Vice Chairman of the Macerich Board of Directors, Emeritus. Mr. Anderson has been with Macerich since 1966 and during his tenure with the company has served as Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President.
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About Macerich: Macerich is an independent real estate investment trust headquartered in Santa Monica, California.
Dave Labuda
Founder, Chairman & Senior Innovation Advisor of MATRIXX Software
Dave Labuda Founder, CEO & CTO MATRIXX was co-founded in 2008 by telecom industry veteran Dave Labuda. His revolutionary vision: making it possible for every Telco & Digital Service Provider to realize the benefits of digital transformation. Dave Labuda co-founded Portal Software in 1994, creating the first real-time billing and revenue management solution for internet and communications service providers. As CTO, he led the architectural design and product strategy of the company. After stepping into the CEO role in 2004, he successfully sold the company to Oracle in 2006. Dave then served as CTO of Oracle’s Communications Global Business Unit until February 2008, providing architectural vision for the new organization and acting as a key advisor on several strategic acquisitions. He started his career at Sun Microsystems working for 8 years in the UNIX Operating Systems group. Dave also serves as a board member for Aria Systems. He holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and has 13 patents issued with several more pending.
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About MATRIXX Software: Provider of a digital commerce platform designed to monetize 5G
Basab Pradhan
Non Executive Chairman of Coforge
Basab Pradhan is the Non Executive Chairman of Coforge.
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About Coforge: Coforge is a IT solutions organization, servicing customers in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Joel York
Chairman & Founder , SaaS , Integrated Marketing of Markodojo
Joel York is the Chief Marketing Officer & Enterprise Content Firewall at Accellion.
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About Markodojo: Markodojo is a company that provides clients with market managing software while embracing agile philosophy.
Laurent El Ghaoui
Executive Chairman, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of SumUp Analytics
Laurent is a leading academic in computing. He is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, and holds a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford, as well as an MsC from the Ecole Polytechnique. He has a great grasp of the finance sector having also worked as a quantitative analyst for the hedge fund SAC Capital Management.
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About Kayrros, SumUp Analytics, University of California Berkeley: SumUp helps organizations denoise and understand their text data.
Pehong Chen
President, CEO and Chairman of the Board of BroadVision
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About BroadVision: BroadVision has been a global leader in providing organizations with the rules, tools and infrastructure for doing business on the Web.
John Hui
Founder and Chairman of Fuhu
John Hui is the Founder and Chairman of Fuhu.
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About Fuhu: Fuhu is a designer and seller of cloud-served software, apps and products and services for children.
William Russell
Non-Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Piksel
William Russell has served as Non-Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors at Piksel since June 2012. Bill also holds the positions of Non-Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors at PROS Holdings, Inc., a leader in pricing and revenue management software. Previously, Bill was a Member of the Board of Directors at Saba Software, Inc., a provider of people-centric enterprise solutions. Bill was a Member of the Audit and Compensation Committees of Saba Software’s board. Bill lends his broad knowledge of large-scale software operations, including sales, marketing, development, finance, strategic planning and leadership, to KIT digital. Bill served in a number of senior-level executive management roles in his 23 years at Hewlett-Packard, including Vice President and General Manager of the multi-billion dollar Enterprise Systems Group and its Software Solutions Group. Bill holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Edinburgh University.
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About : Piksel designs, builds, develops and manages successful video solutions.
Mitch Thrower
Founder & Chairman of Events.com
He is the Founder and Chairman of Events.com, an innovative cloud-based Event Management Platform provider that provides a state of the art mobile-first SaaS application that enables the full event life-cycle, connecting event organizers and event goers. Events.com enables event organizers to plan, promote, and ticket their events while also providing event goers the tools to discover, register, collaborate, share, and celebrate their experiences. Thrower also serves as Chairman of The La Jolla Foundation, a 501c3 foundation whose primary initiative is Project Active, providing funding, mentoring, encouragement and education to areas of world tension. Specifically — sending sports equipment to children in war zones. Thrower Co-Founded active.com (The Active Network, Inc.). He also launched ActiveEurope.com (Active Europe Network) as Co-Founder and CEO. Active went public before selling to Vista for 1.05 billion. Thrower was the President and Chief Operating Officer of Triathlete Magazine, the world’s largest triathlon magazine where he also served as Chairman. He has also served as the Chief Interactive Officer, Strategist & Senior Correspondent for the Competitor Group (CGI), the active lifestyle industry’s leading media and event entertainment company. Thrower spoke at his university graduation at St. Lawrence University, and has lectured at many colleges such as Stanford University, Anderson School at UCLA, UCSD and the University of San Diego where he served as the “Entrepreneur in Residence” teaching Entrepreneurship. Thrower is an active member of TED.com and the Executive Producer of TEDxLaJolla, an independently organized TED event. He is the Author of “The Attention Deficit Workplace: Winning Strategies for Success in Today’s Fast-Paced Business Environment,” published by Lyons Press and he was author of the popular monthly column, “Starting Lines” in Triathlete Magazine for more than a decade. He was also co-author of the travel guide “The Passport” which, for several years was distributed to 50,000 college students before traveling abroad each year. In 1990, Thrower co-founded his first company and served as CEO of The College/Rail Connection, Inc., serving American Express, AT&T, and Eurail until he sold the venture in 1997. Thrower graduated from the Executive Institute at Stanford University. He holds a MBA from the University of San Diego and a bachelor’s degree from Saint Lawrence University. He has competed in 22 Ironman Triathlons, including 13 World Championships. He is the only photo journalist to ever photograph and film the Ironman Triathlon World Championships while competing in the event. Thrower is an East Coast native whose father, Fred Thrower was a television pioneer as Vice President of NBC, and also as president of WPIX-TV in New York City and is known for his holiday creation of the televised “Yule Log.” Thrower’s mother, Lori, worked as an assistant for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in NYC. Thrower is happily married to his lovely wife Amanda and lives in La Jolla, California.
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About Events.com, La Jolla Foundation, Inc, La Jolla Holding: Events.com is an event management platform that manage, market, and monetize low-key fundraisers, massive festivals, and marathons.
Eirini Schlosser
Chairman & CEO of Dyania Health
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About Dyania Health, MedicusData.AI: Dyania Health develops a research platform for pharma companies and hospital systems.
Ujj Nath
Chairman & CEO of myKaarma
Ujj Nath is the Chairman & CEO at MyKaarma.
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About myKaarma: myKaarma is a cloud based automotive customer interaction management company.
Jim Gilliam
Founder & Executive Chairman of NationBuilder
Jim Gilliam is the founder and CEO of 3dna, a startup building internet tools to shake up a broken political system. Previously, he co-founded Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, building a non-profit grassroots media company of a million members and producing four documentaries. In the late 90’s, he launched Business.com as its Chief Technology Officer, and worked at Lycos, one of the first internet search engines.
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About NationBuilder: NationBuilder is a community organizing software platform that helps people organize and build community-based relationships.
Carol Mills
Executive Chairman and Development Consultant of Xactly
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About Xactly: Xactly is the pure-play provider of cloud-based, incentive compensation software.
Scott Jarus
Executive Chairman of EV Connect
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About EV Connect, Food Forward, Social Venture Partners: EV Connect provides enterprise-class, electric vehicle charging software, and solutions.
Ariel Poler
Chairman of TextMarks
Ariel Poler is the Co-Founder at Reveri Health.
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About Instructables, Kongregate, Reveri, TextMarks: TextMarks is a mobile marketing provider of group mobile alerts for consumers and a group text messaging platform for businesses.
Romesh Wadhwani
Chairman and CEO of SymphonyAI
Romesh Wadhwani founded Symphony Technology Group in 2002 for one reason: he is passionate about building companies. After a 30-year career as an entrepreneur in the enterprise software sector, Romesh launched STG to lend his expertise and passion to investing. Before starting STG, Romesh was the founder, chairman and CEO of Aspect Development, Inc. until 1999, when the company was acquired by i2 Technologies. For nearly a decade, Romesh grew Aspect Development into a leader in business-to-business commerce software, which culminated in the merger of Aspect with supply chain software company i2 Technologies. At that time, this combination was one of the largest enterprise software mergers.
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About ConcertAI, National Entrepreneurship Network, Symphony RetailAI, Symphony Summit, Symphony Technology Group, Symphony Technology Group, SymphonyAI, Terarecon, Wadhwani AI, Wadhwani Foundation: SymphonyAI is an enterprise AI company focused on delivering AI solutions for vertical sectors
Prayag Narula
Founder & Chairman Of The Board of LeadGenius
Prayag Narula is the Founder and President of LeadGenius, a marketing and sales data management company and social enterprise based out of Berkeley, CA. LeadGenius is used by top marketers in fortune 500 and public companies and has raised over $22 million in funding from some of the most prestigious VCs in Silicon Valley. The LeadGenius mission is to combine technology & machine learning with human intelligence, while providing meaningful jobs to communities around world. Prayag cofounded LeadGenius as a graduate student at the Cal Berkeley School of Information. Before Berkeley, Prayag was working as a research scientist at Helsinki University in Finland. He has authored over a dozen research papers in the fields of Computer Systems, Machine Learning, and Human Computer Interaction.
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About LeadGenius, LeadGenius: LeadGenius is an end-to-end sales solution that provides companies with a way to generate, qualify, deliver, and convert leads.
Philippe Cases
Chairman and CEO of Spoke
Philippe Cases joined [Partech](/financial-organization/partech) in 1997 and focuses on software. Prior to joining Partech, Philippe was a Partner with Sofinnova in Paris. He was a Director of Egide and BVRP (both listed on the French market) and Adknowledge (acq. by CMGI). In addition, he was involved with Flamel Technologies (FLML) and Rightpoint Software (acq. by E.piphany). Philippe currently sits on the board of directors of Jaspersoft, Spoke Software and is a board advisor to InQuira. He attended the Engineering School of Mines in Nancy, France and received an MS from Stanford University where he was named a Sloan Fellow.
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About ReadWrite Labs, Spoke, Topio Networks: Spoke is a personal connections manager that unifies all the user’s contact sources to help them reconnect with lost contacts.
Andrew Rudd
Founder Chairman & CEO of Advisor Software
Andrew is Chairman and CEO of Advisor Software, Inc. Andrew is also a co-founder and former chairman and CEO of Barra, Inc., where he served as CEO from 1984 to 1999. He is the co-author of two industry-leading books on institutional investing: “Modern Portfolio Theory: The Principles of Investment Management” and “Option Pricing”, and co-editor with Prof. Stephen Satchell of “Quantitative Approaches to High Net Worth Investment.” Andrew was also Professor of Finance and Operations Research at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In addition, he has written numerous journal articles and research papers on a wide range of domestic and international investment practices and theories. Andrew received his Bachelor of Science degree with honors in Mathematics and Physics from Sussex University in England, and earned a M.Sc. in Operations Research, an M.B.A in Finance and International Business, and a Ph.D. in Finance and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley.
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About Advisor Software, Advisor Software: Introducing the Advisor Software Wealth Management Cloud. The Future-Proof Financial Technology Platform
Edward Sanderson
Chairman of SAIC
Edward Sanderson retired from Oracle Corporation in 2002 as an Executive Vice President after having served since 1995. At Oracle, Mr. Sanderson was responsible for Oracle Product Industries, Oracle Consulting and the Latin American Division. Prior to Oracle, he was President of Unisys Worldwide Services and a partner at both McKinsey & Company and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). He was previously a director of Leidos Holdings, Inc. from 2002 until September 2013, and a director of Quantum Corp. until September 2005. Since February 2015, Mr. Sanderson has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of The Scripps Research Institute, one of the world’s largest private biomedical research organizations.
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About : SAIC provides scientific, engineering, and systems integration and technical services and solutions in the United States.
Ernie Bray
Chairman & CEO of ACD – AutoClaims Direct
Ernie Bray is an award-winning Entrepreneur & CEO and expert on leadership, social media, entrepreneurship and business strategy. He bootstrapped and built a highly successful company which he has led to six annual rankings on the Inc. 5000, four years on Deloitte’s Technology Fast-500 and Entrepreneur’s “Best Entrepreneurial Companies In America”. He regularly writes for Forbes, Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, HuffPost, TechCo and has been featured in Inc.com. In addition to leading his insurance technology company, he is an author & speaker who believes in inspiring others to build and drive their own success.
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About ACD – AutoClaims Direct, ACDCORP.AI, Forbes Technology Council: ACD provides technology and network management solutions for the auto & property claims industry.
Radhesh Aria
Founder, Chairman of the Board, and the Chief Executive Officer of Aria Atlantic
Radhesh Aria (born 29 Sep 2002) is the eldest in the family and is the Founder, Chairman of the Board, and the Chief Executive Officer of Aria Atlantic, LLC. and is also the mastermind behind many of Aria Atlantic’s dealings Radhesh Arya (born September 29, 2002) is an American Actor, Socialite, and Entrepreneur. In 2017 he had moved to Los Angeles to begin his career in acting and had starred in Disney’s remake of Mulan and etc. With sister Samiksha and brother Nadish, Aria’s are involved in fashion and online retail. They have launched several clothing collections on their websites and are planning on expanding by 2022. Radhesh founded Aria Atlantic, LLC in late 2020
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About Aria Atlantic: Aria Atlantic, or often abbreviated as Aria, was founded in 2019 by Radhesh Aria. While it is also often confused as Glass Distributers
Peter Caswell
Chairman & CEO of NetBase Solutions
Peter Caswell is the CEO at NetBase Solutions
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About Netbase Quid, NetBase Solutions, Xentra Services: NetBase provides social intelligence solutions that enable brands to publish, monitor, analyze and engage with customers in real time.
Kevin DeNuccio
Executive Chairman of SevOne
Kevin A. DeNuccio is Violin’s President and Chief Executive Officer and has served as a Member of the Board of Directors since February 2014. Previously, Kevin served as Chief Executive Officer of Metaswitch Networks Ltd., a telecommunications hardware and software company, from February 2010 until June 2012. Kevin remained a Member of the Board of Directors at Metaswitch Networks until joining Violin Memory, Inc. Kevin served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Redback Networks Inc., a provider of edge routers, from August 2001 until its acquisition by Ericsson in January 2007 after emerging from bankruptcy in 2004. From 1995 to 2001, Kevin held a number of executive positions at Cisco Systems, including Senior Vice President of Worldwide Service Provider Operations. Prior to joining Cisco, Kevin was President and Chief Executive Officer of Bell Atlantic Network Integration, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bell Atlantic (now Verizon Communications). Kevin has also held senior management positions at both Unisys Corporation and Wang Laboratories network integration and worldwide channel partner business. Kevin previously served on numerous public and private boards of directors including Redback Networks, JDS Uniphase Corporation, KPMG consulting (BearingPoint), Netpliance (TippingPoint), Salesnet and SanDisk. Kevin currently serves on the board of directors of Calix, GrndCntrl, SevOne and Northeastern University. Kevin earned a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Northeastern University.
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About : SevOne provides the only digital infrastructure monitoring solution engineered for Speed at Scale for the world’s demanding.
Sharam Sasson
Chairman of Jitterbit
Mr. Sharam Sasson is a Partner at Primera Capital. Mr. Sasson has a proven track record of investing and leading organizations from inception through profitability. Mr. Sasson has 13 years of experience in investing in technology companies and formally with Primera Capital since 2008. Prior to Primera Capital Mr. Sasson has lead three exceptionally successful technology companies from their inception. Mr. Sasson was the founding Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Extensity, an enterprise software company, which Mr. Sasson guided from inception to record-breaking Initial Public Offering and final acquisition by GEAC in 2003. He served as Chief Executive Officer of Jitterbit, Inc. until May 2011. Mr. Sasson was also a co-founder of Scopus Technology, a premier provider of enterprise Customer Relationship Management systems. Mr. Sasson possesses a solid engineering background from his early work as a research scientist at Lockheed Missile and Aerospace Corporation, and as a developer of structural modeling software at Bechtel Corporation. He founded and serves as Executive Chairman of Jitterbit, Inc. He serves as Director at Kiverdi, Inc. He holds a master’s degree in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.S.C. from Queen Mary College, University of London.
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About : Jitterbit is an API transformation company helping businesses to exploit data from any source.
David W. Sanders
Chairman & CEO of CyberCSI
David Sanders has been a successful tech entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley for over 20 years. Mr. Sanders’ career as a serial entrepreneur began at an early age with disk jockey and database consulting businesses. After serving as a consultant to distinguished high-tech companies, including Apple and Hewlett Packard, Mr. Sanders founded cyberCSI. He currently serves as its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Since its founding in 1993, cyberCSI has been providing IT outsourcing services and most recently proprietary cloud software to medium to large-size companies. In the past several years, Mr. Sanders’ business interests have expanded to angel investing and the founding of successful websites including GottaBeMobile.com, MoneyNation.com, MotorReview.com and Notebooks.com. Beyond his business interests, Mr. Sanders supports numerous philanthropic causes and organizations. He sits on the board of Goodwill Silicon Valley and is an active global member of Gen Next, a nonprofit comprised of executives and entrepreneurs dedicated to helping the next generation pursue economic growth, education and international security. In addition, Mr. Sanders directed the raising of $4.0+M for outreach to disadvantaged individuals and families struggling with alcohol and drug addiction and is a volunteer at Veterans of Foreign War events.
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About CyberCSI: cyberCSI provides the most cost effective IT life cycle management services utilizing proprietary cloud software. Cyber security for SMB’s.
Josh Brewer
Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Abstract
Josh is a vocal advocate for Design Leadership, writing and speaking about the challenges of building Design-led companies and products. In his current role as CEO of Abstract, an Advisor & Mentor to the Designer Fund, and previously as Principal Designer at Twitter, Josh continues to influence the centrality of Design in early and late-stage companies.
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About Abstract: Abstract is the design workflow management system that empowers design teams and stakeholders to seamlessly manage, version and collaborate.
John De Santis
Chairman & CEO of HyTrust
John De Santis is the CEO & Board Chairman of HyTrust Inc. He has operated at the bleeding edge of innovation and business transformation for over 30 years – with international and US based experience at venture-backed technology start-ups as well as large global public companies. Most recently, Mr. De Santis was VP, Cloud Services for VMware. He joined VMware after being Chairman and CEO of TriCipher, a software security infrastructure company acquired by VMware in 2010. He led TriCipher’s transformation from a specialized niche provider of secure authentication solutions to the leading innovator in cloud based identity services for web application and SaaS access management. Convergys Corporation) where he was Vice President, European Operations, responsible for delivering operational support systems and business process re-engineering to newly deregulated European telecommunication service providers. When he was 28 years old, he co-founded an optical fiber networking start up which built the first commercial application of optical channel networking for IBM mainframes. Prior to TriCipher, Mr. De Santis served as CEO of enterprise security software company, Sygate Technologies, from 2000 until its acquisition by Symantec in 2005. Sygate’s innovations continue to provide the foundational technology for Symantec’s Endpoint Protection business. Prior to joining Sygate, he was SVP for Network Computing Devices (a leading thin client manufacturer), where he was responsible for all Worldwide Sales, Marketing, and Service operations. Prior to NCD, he was with Cincinnati Bell Information Systems (now Mr. De Santis earned an AB in Philosophy from Fairfield University and completed the Stanford University Executive Institute Program for Management of High-Tech Companies. De Santis is currently on the Board of Neohapsis, the premier provider of security, governance, risk and compliance services to highly regulated enterprises and government agencies. Previously, he was on the Boards of Tablus (data leakage protection software – acquired by RSA), Applied Identity (identity based access control software – acquired by Citrix).
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About HyTrust: HyTrust specializes in security, compliance and control software for private, hybrid and public cloud infrastructure.
Martin Eberhard
Founder, Chairman, CTO of Tiveni
Martin Eberhard is an engineer, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and inventor on at least 17 patents. He received a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1982 and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the same school in 1984. Recently, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award and an Alumni Award for Distinguished Service from The University of Illinois. Eberhard co-founded Network Computing Devices in 1987, where he served as Chief Engineer through its IPO on 1992, developing several successful products there. In 1996, Eberhard founded NuvoMedia with his colleague, Marc Tarpenning, where they developed the Rocket eBook, the first eBook with secure internet delivery of content. Eberhard served as Chairman and CEO until NuvoMedia’s acquisition by Gemstar in 2000. In 2002, after their successful exit from Nuvomedia, Eberhard and his colleague, Marc Tarpenning, founded Tesla Motors, where Eberhard served as its CEO until November, 2007. Together, Eberhard and Tarpenning reinvented the electric car, changing public perception of electric cars to fast, sexy desirable cars that will obviously become the future of transportation. Eberhard’s key innovations have set the way for all subsequent electric cars: 1) an electric car should not be a compromise. With the right technology choices, it is possible to build electric cars that are actually better cars than their competition. 2) Battery technology is key to a successful electric car. Lithium ion batteries are not only suitable of automotive use, but are game-changing, making decent driving range a reality. 3) If designed right, electric cars can appeal to even the most serious car enthusiast, as electric drive is capable of seriously outperforming internal combustion engines. In 2007, Eberhard left Tesla Motors with a fair bit of press drama, as his largest investor took control of the company. Despite the drama, Eberhard is very pleased to watch Tesla succeed in the trajectory that he first envisioned. Since leaving Tesla Motors, Eberhard served for two years as Director of EV Development at Volkswagen. He has lectured around the world on reasons and methods for reducing the use of carbon fuels, on the advantages of electric drive over other automotive technologies, and on entrepreneurship and the need for more young people to pursue degrees and careers in science and engineering. He currently serves on Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards of several innovative, early-stage Silicon Valley startup companies.
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About INEVIT, Inc., Tiveni: Tiveni provides battery technology for automobile companies throughout the State of California.
Pep Gubau
Executive Chairman, CTO & Co-Founder of Aizon
Pep is an IT entrepreneur and has been working in IT for the last 25 years, being pioneer in Linux adoption in the 90s, cloud in the 2000s and big data in the last years. Although having a theoretical economics and maths profile, his early career was as a software developer for the chemical industry. He later was CTO & COO of an IT consulting firm, leading a team of more than 200 engineers until 2003 when Pep created his first IT company with a clear core principle: customer centric focus. Two more followed. In 2013 Pep started thinking on the next thing to work on. bigfinite is the result of this initial spark that immediately caught fire in Pere and Toni. Pep is Economist (University of Barcelona) with an engineering background.
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About Aizon: Aizon is a cloud-based SaaS platform that helps optimize industrial processes in biotech and pharma.
Erwin Lenowitz
Chairman of HG Insights
Erwin Lenowitz is Chairman at HG Data Company.
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About HG Insights: HG Insights uses advanced data science to provide B2B companies a better way to analyze markets and target prospects.
Matt Schnuck
Chairman & Co-Founder of Shortlist
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About Shortlist: A Passion for unlocking professionals.
Dirk Brown
Chairman & CEO of Pandoodle
Dirk Brown is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Pandoodle Corp. Previously, Dirk was an Executive Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Strategy at Neoconix. Dirk co-founded Neoconix and was acting CEO of the company until mid-2006. Dirk was previously Executive Vice President at High Connection Density (HCD) where he was General Manager for both the connector and subsystems business units. Earlier in his career, Dirk managed semiconductor R&D programs at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Dirk has served as an industry mentor with the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and as a member of the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC). Dirk has published extensively and has filed over 20 patents in the areas of connectors, semiconductors and printed circuit technologies. Dirk earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Cornell University and has an M.B.A. from San Jose State University.
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About Pandoodle, PROOF Alcohol Ice Cream, University of South Carolina: Pandoodle is a visual content, discovery, and dynamic computer vision customization technology for in-content advertising.
Fay Arjomandi
Executive Chairman of H2 Wellness
Fay Arjomandi joined Vodafone as the Head of US Group R&D in January 2011. Bringing an extensive wealth of expertise as an extraordinary entrepreneur to Vodafone’s new heart of innovation, Fay successfully launched Vodafone xone in Silicon Valley in September 2011, which became the global incubation initiative of Vodafone Group. Fay spearheads partnership work with emerging and disruptive technologies to enable start-up companies to develop, test and prepare for commercial deployment in global markets. Additionally, her role expands on leading Vodafone Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Vodafone Group. Fay’s broad range of role also includes being the President of Vodafone Americas Foundation, an outreach program whose mission is to mobilize communities to resolve shared problems and to enable mobile technology to advance social change. In addition to exceptional leadership and impeccable integrity, Fay sharpens the saw with her specialization in wireless communications, software applications and protocol development. Prior to Vodafone, Fay was the co-founder and CEO of three technology start-ups that built location-based services, quality of service, and multimedia content distribution platforms used by mobile operators globally. As a pragmatic technology innovator, Fay has authored 12 patents. In 2006, Fay received the distinguished Business In Vancouver’s “Top 40 Under 40” award presented to those who are under the age of 40 and are exceptional outstanding leaders in their chosen fields shaping the country’s future. In 2007, she was the Canadian technology and innovation representative to the White House. Fay holds a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Concordia University.
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About H2 Wellness, mimik, Mobidia Technology: H2 Wellness is a SaaS-based technology company delivering online and mobile interactive health management platforms.
Alvin Hung
Founder & Executive Chairman of Vyond
Alvin is happiest when he sees people use his products with ease and enthusiasm. A well-rounded serial entrepreneur, you’ll find him going through product designs, digging into usage statistics, architecting scalable systems, experimenting with business models, and driving online marketing for GoAnimate. Alvin is about building companies that transform difficult processes into user-friendly solutions. Prior to GoAnimate, Alvin was the co-founder and CTO of Ascent Technology, a dead-simple CRM system for financial professionals. Before that, he was the co-founder and CTO of Net Strategy, an international domain name technology company. Alvin holds a B.A. from Columbia University where he double majored in Computer Science and Economics. You can follow Alvin on Twitter at @alvinhung
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About Vyond: Vyond puts the power of video in the hands of everyone.
Gus Laredo
President and Chairman of Trueforce
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About Autobox, Trueforce: Trueforce is a leading software services and solutions consulting company
Gary Read
Chairman and CEO of import.io
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About import.io: import.io offers a Web Data Integration solution that provides global businesses with high-quality, scalable data from the web.