Category: Investors, Advisors & Speakers (Page 4 of 8)

Carl Showalter

Carl Showalter brings more than 12 years of executive experience to Opus from innovative and market-making technology companies such as Juniper Networks and UUNET. Carl’s current areas of interest include the Internet of Things, network virtualization, next generation wireless, and data center/cloud infrastructure software.

Before joining Opus Carl was a General Partner with Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prior to this Carl served as Vice President of Marketing at Juniper Networks, where he built and led a global marketing and product management organization. Before Juniper, Carl was Vice President of Dial and Broadband Services for UUNET, overseeing the 300-person, $1B revenue division. He also held various sales and management positions at ANS, an AOL company, where he helped build AOL’s modem access network and then helped launch hardware-based firewalls and IP VPNs in the mid 1990’s. Read More...

Peter Gardner

Peter Gardner brings 17 years of professional venture investing to Wavepoint Ventures and has extensive experience raising capital, managing investment portfolios, structuring financings, and building management teams. He has served on the boards of more than a dozen early-stage, venture-backed technology companies.

Prior to Wavepoint Peter was a general partner at Allegis Capital, a $515 million venture capital firm located in Palo Alto, CA. During Peter’s tenure at Allegis the firm increased its capital under management seven-fold. Prior to Allegis, Peter was a vice president at Technology Funding, Inc., a $315 million venture capital firm. Before entering the venture capital industry Peter was a project leader at Weston Solutions, a national engineering and consulting company. He began his career in lab positions at Genetics Institute and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Read More...

Susan Preston

Susan Preston, General Partner at CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund, has spent most of her career in senior management positions in public and private companies, from general counsel to CEO. She has also been a partner in two national law firms and is a patent attorney.

Susan is a world-recognized expert in angel financing, and is the author of numerous articles, white papers and books on angel financing. Her most recent book, Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs, was released by Wiley Publishing. She has been and continues to be a national and international speaker on economic development, angel and venture financing. She was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the Kauffman Foundation for six years focusing on initiatives related to angel investing, angel organizations and women entrepreneurs. She is the architect of the Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs Act, a bi-partisan federal income tax credit bill for private equity investing, which will be re-introduced in Congress this session. Read More...

Bruce Schechter

Bruce Schechter is a member of the Band of Angels, and is an advisor to several technology startups. In particular, he enjoys mentoring early-stage founders on business strategy, go-to-market strategy, and fund raising.

Bruce began his career at Intel Corporation in 1980, and served a 17 year stint at the company in a variety of roles including Fab Process Development Engineering, Microprocessor Product Management, Technical Assistant to the Sr. VP of Corporate Strategy, and Director of Online Marketing. In 1997, Bruce was among the founding team of Pandesic LLC, a pioneer application service provider, where he served as Director of Operations Management and then Director of Strategic Alliances. In 2007, Bruce received his MS in Computer Science from Stanford, at twice the age of most of his classmates. Read More...

Pete Sinclair

Pete Sinclair’s background includes over 20 years of senior operating experience in high tech companies and more than 10 years in venture capital. He has been a serial CEO, successfully selling companies to Microsoft, Novell, and Adobe Systems, and has participated in two IPOs. He started his career with Hewlett-Packard and joined Apple Computer when it was still a small private company.

Pete founded Leapfrog in 1999, and is rated as one of the Top 30 VCs by Business Insider. Pete has a BS in Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he graduated in the top 10% of his class in 3 years. He is also a graduate of Stanford Business School’s Executive Program for Small Company Presidents and twice served as the Mayor of the Town of Woodside. He is an avid aviation buff and is currently flying a high performance pressurized airplane that he built himself. Read More...

Todd Kimmel

Todd Kimmel is an experienced entrepreneur and investor in the cleantech sector. Todd joined Mayfield Fund from Advanced Technology Ventures, a bi-coastal venture capital firm, where he led cleantech investing in its West Coast office.

Todd was also the co-founder and president of Coskata, a leading next-generation bio-fuels company, where he helped drive key product development, technology and financing milestones. Prior to venture capital, Todd was a co-founder and senior vice president at Innovance, a Canadian-based developer of optical networking solutions for telecommunications service providers and worked in investment banking with Wasserstein Perella & Co., Inc. in New York. Todd holds a BA from Amherst College and was a history major. Read More...

Carol Sands

Carol Sands is the Founder and the Managing Member of The Angels’ Forum and The Halo Funds. Carol’s career started as a bank officer with First Bank Systems. She has also held marketing or sales positions with Motorola and Xerox Computer Services and executive positions at Arthur Young (now Ernst & Young) and Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers).

Carol later founded Sands MarketingPlus, an international sales management and marketing consulting firm with advertising and PR agencies. In 1997, she incorporated The Angels’ Forum Management Company, the parent company of The Angel’s Forum, a revolutionary company in angel investing that organizes individual investors with previous entrepreneurial experience to invest as a single entity using a venture capital model for due diligence, mentoring, and board management. Read More...

Ryan Spoon

Ryan Spoon is a principal in San Francisco at Polaris’ Dog Patch Lab. He focuses on investments in internet, technology, and digital media. Ryan blogs at www.ryanspoon.com. Prior to joining Polairs, Ryan worked at Widgetbox as VP of Marketing & Business Development. Ryan spent 2003-2007 at eBay Inc.

As part of the internet marketing team, Ryan focused on user acquisition, search engine optimization and social content properties like eBay MyWorld and Reviews & Guides. Most recently, Ryan launched and managed the Kijiji.com business. In 2000, as a collegiate swimmer for Duke university, Ryan founded beRecruited, a sports recruiting platform for high school athletes and college coaches. beRecruited was acquired by RVS Ventures in 2007 and Ryan currently serves on the board of directors. Read More...

Sam Kingsland

Sam Kingsland of Granite Ventures brings extensive experience working with emerging growth companies to the team.  Over Sam’s eighteen-year career in the venture industry, he has worked with more than 70 venture-backed companies and on more than 115 financings. 

During his career, he has worked with early-stage companies in the wireless, semiconductor, software, internet and consumer markets.  Sam lead Granite’s investments in DigitalThink (acquired by Convergys), NetBoost (acquired by Intel), Nexabit Networks (acquired by Lucent), Sierra Wireless (NASDAQ: SWIR) and SnapTrack (acquired by Qualcomm).  He currently serves on the Boards of Directors for Agilence, Fulcrum Microsystems, Grid2Home and Venturi Wireless.  Sam holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College. Read More...

Neal Hansch

Neal Hansch of Rustic Canyon Partners brings over fifteen years of venture capital, technology operations and financial advisory experience to Rustic Canyon and its portfolio companies.

Before joining Rustic Canyon in 2005, Neal worked in the Corporate Development group at Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR), where he was responsible for global M&A transactions and strategic equity investments. Prior to Macromedia, Neal was an investor at Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) and also spent time in Product Marketing at webMethods (Nasdaq: WEBM). Read More...