Culture

Ashwin Navin is the President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent, Inc. He joined Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, in 2004, moving from Yahoo! where he was an influential member of the company's Corporate Development group. He possesses extensive experience in structuring and negotiating acquisitions, partnerships and alliances in the tech industry. While at Yahoo!, Ashwin was responsible for M&A, divestitures and company strategy in the U.S. and key global markets such as India and Korea. Before Yahoo!, Ashwin worked with Wall Street powerhouses Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Merrill Lynch as an investment banker and research analyst. Ashwin earned a dual B.A. from Claremont McKenna in Government and Economics.

Ping joined Accel in 2004 and focuses primarily on information technology infrastructure and digital media solutions. He currently serves on the Board of Directors at BitTorrent, Mendocino Software, Mochi Media, Mu Security, and YuMe. Prior to Accel, Ping was a Senior Product Line Manager and Director of Corporate Development at Juniper Networks. He managed a product portfolio with revenues of over $50 mm/quarter. He also worked as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company. Ping has extensive international experience as well. He has worked at Singapore Telecom and at Goldman Sachs Asia. Ping continues to work in Asia with IDG-Accel China Fund. Ping holds an A.B. from Harvard University, with honors, and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Dominic Orr was named President and CEO of Aruba Networks in April 2006. Prior to that, Mr. Orr served as the company's Chairman of the Board. Previously, Dominic Orr was the president of Nortel Networks, Intelligent Internet Web Systems. He previously served as the president and chief executive of Alteon WebSystems which was merged with Nortel Networks in Oct. 2000. Mr. Orr has more than 20 years of experience in the computer systems and communication networking industry and has held senior positions at Bay Networks, Hewlett-Packard and Hughes Aircraft. Mr. Orr. is a member of the Sciences Board of Visitors at UCLA. He holds a BS in physics from City University of New York and a MS and PhD from California Institute of Technology.

William Sahlman is the Dimitri V. d'Arbeloff - Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The d'Arbeloff Chair was established in 1986 to support teaching and research on the entrepreneurial process. The Chair honors the late Dimitri d'Arbeloff (HBS '55), whose entrepreneurial skills helped make Millipore Corporation a world leader in its industry. Mr. Sahlman received an A.B. degree in Economics from Princeton University, an M.B.A. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Business Economics, also from Harvard. His research focuses on the investment and financing decisions made in entrepreneurial ventures at all stages in their development. Mr. Sahlman was co-chair of the Entrepreneurship and Service Management Unit from 1999 to 2002. From 1991 to 1999, he was Senior Associate Dean, Director of Publishing Activities, and chairman of the board for Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. From 1990 to 1991, he was chairman of the Harvard University Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. He is a member of the board of directors of several private companies.

Warren Packard is the CEO of Thuuz, a consumer platform for real-time sports discovery, tune-in and sharing. Packard is also a venture partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He currently serves on the Boards of EoPlex, Microfabrica and SeaMicro and leads DFJ's investments in BinOptica, Hola!, Primet Precision Materials, and YeePay. Prior to joining DFJ, Warren co-founded Angara Database Systems, a main memory relational database company, which was acquired by Personify.  Prior to co-founding Angara, he was an Associate at Institutional Venture Partners, investing in early-stage technology companies. Before IVP, Warren was a Senior Principal Engineer in the Advanced Product Development Group at Baxter International.  Warren is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University and holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering: Smart Product Design.  He received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Carleton S. (Carly) Fiorina was president and chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard Company from 1999 to 2005. She served as chairman of the board from 2000 to 2005. Prior to joining HP, Fiorina spent nearly 20 years at AT&T and Lucent Technologies, where she held a number of senior leadership positions and directed Lucent's initial public offering and subsequent spin-off from AT&T. Fiorina was named an honorary fellow of the London Business School in July 2001. In 2002, she was honored with the Appeal of Conscience Award, and in 2003 she received the Concern Worldwide "Seeds of Hope" Award in recognition of her worldwide efforts to make global citizenship a priority for business. The Private Sector Council honored Fiorina with its 2004 Leadership Award for her contributions to improving the business of government. Also in 2004, the White House appointed her to the U.S. Space Commission. Fiorina has a bachelor's degree in medieval history and philosophy from Stanford University. She holds a master's degree in business administration from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland at College Park, Md., and a master of science degree from MIT's Sloan School.

William Perry is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at Stanford University, in the School of Engineering's Department of Management Science & Engineering. From February 1994 to January 1997, Perry served as the 19th Secretary of Defense for the United States. He previously served as Deputy Secretary of Defense (1993-1994) and as Under Secretary of Defense for research and engineering (1977-1981). At Stanford, Perry is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Hoover Institution, and serves as director of the Preventive Defense Project. He is an expert in U.S. foreign policy, national security and arms control, and served as co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation from 1988 to 1993. Perry has served in the Army and been honored many times over by the United States, its armed forces and governments throughout Europe and the Middle East. He received a B.S. and M.S. from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics.

Stan Christensen is a partner at Arbor Advisors, an investment banking firm where he negotiates on behalf of mid-market technology companies. He has nearly twenty years of experience in both transactional and operations roles and has worked on hundreds of transactions. Before starting Arbor, he was the General Manager of Eazel, a Linux-based software startup. He started his career in corporate finance on Wall Street, and then worked for ten years with CMG, a negotiation advisory firm affiliated with The Harvard Negotiation Project. In this capacity he worked with corporations and governments-advising, negotiating, and mediating transactions and conflicts. In 1996 he was selected as a Kellogg Fellow for his work in the non-profit and public sectors. He is a member of The Council On Foreign Relations and currently teaches a course on Negotiation at Stanford University in The School of Engineering. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.A. from Brigham Young University.

Greg Waldorf was the founding investor in eHarmony, and as its CEO from 2006 to 2010, had overall responsibility for leading all aspects of eHarmony's business. After, he was a CEO-in-residence at the venture capital firm Accel Partners, and he now leads Palo Alto-based Invoice.2go as its CEO. Waldorf's entrepreneurial endeavors include being a co-founder of Startup, an East Palo Alto non-profit that has provided business training for nearly 500 aspiring entrepreneurs in that community since 1994. He holds a B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has been cited on matters relating to investing and technology in the New York Times, San Jose Mercury News and BusinessWeek among other publications and he has made numerous broadcast appearances on CNBC.

Over the past decade, Reid Hoffman has become a leading voice in entrepreneurship, with successes in the consumer Internet and online payment spaces. Hoffman is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at LinkedIn. Founded in 2003, LinkedIn is the world's largest professional networking service, with more than 60 million members in 200 countries. The company's diversified revenue model includes subscriptions, advertising and software licensing. Hoffman also serves as a partner at Greylock Partners. Prior to LinkedIn, Reid was Executive Vice President of PayPal. At PayPal, Reid was in charge of all business relationships: business development, corporate development, international, government relations, and banking/payments infrastructure. During his tenure at PayPal, Hoffman was instrumental to the acquisition by eBay and was responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo. Reid also has held management roles in large technology companies, including Fujitsu Software Corporation and Apple. Currently, in addition to LinkedIn, Reid serves on the Board of Directors for SixApart and Mozilla Corporation. Reid graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and from Oxford University with a Master's in philosophy.

Greg Ballard, President & Chief Executive Officer Over his distinguished career in the gaming, entertainment and multimedia industries, Greg Ballard has served as CEO at SONICblue, makers of ReplayTV and Rio digital music players; MyFamily.com, a successful subscription-based Internet service; and 3Dfx where, over a three-year period, he grew the company from $4 million to an annualized rate of more than $400 million. He previously served as CEO and COO for Warner Custom Music, a division of Time Warner, Inc. Ballard was also president of Capcom Software, the U.S. subsidiary known for hits such as Street Fighter, Mega-Man and Resident Evil, as well as COO and CFO of Digital Pictures, a leading video game developer for Sega CD. In recent years Ballard has served on the board of directors for xFire, an online gaming platform and community purchased by Viacom in April 2006, and on the public boards of THQ (NASDAQ: THQI), Pinnacle Systems and IGN. He holds a B.A. from the University of Redlands and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Marissa leads the product management efforts on Google's search products- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google's first female engineer and led the user interface and webserver teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google's search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. In her spare time, Marissa also organizes Google Movies- outings a few times a year to see the latest blockbusters- for 6,000+ people (employees plus family members and friends). Concurrently with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford to over 3,000 students. Stanford has recognized her with the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award for her outstanding contribution to undergraduate education. Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. Graduating with honors, Marissa received her BS in Symbolic Systems and her MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence. Courtesy of Google, Bart Nagel

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, a networking tool used by college students to meet people, reconnect with old friends and arrange events. The company just redesigned its Web site and received venture capital. Founded as Thefacebook in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz at Harvard, the website spread across campus and, within a few weeks, over half the undergraduate population had registered. The website then expanded to allow students from Columbia, Stanford, and then other Ivy League colleges to register. It became something of a network phenomenon, spreading rapidly to other schools, despite some competition from similar, local websites. Courtesy of http://www.accel.com/people/index.php, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6596533/site/newsweek, and http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/09082005/biz_nati/61811.htm.

Kim Popovits has served as President and Chief Operating Officer since February 2002, and as a director since March 2002. From November 1987 to February 2002, Kim served in various roles at Genentech, Inc., a biotechnology company, most recently as Senior Vice President, Marketing and Sales from February 2001 to February 2002, and as Vice President, Sales from October 1994 to February 2001. Prior to joining Genentech in November 1987, she served as Division Manager for American Critical Care, a Division of American Hospital Supply. Kim holds a BA in Business from Michigan State University.

Janice Fraser is the CEO and a founding partner of Adaptive Path. She has worked in high-tech media for more than 15 years as an entrepreneur, interaction designer, and editor. She joined the internet back when the blink tag was big, and began to pioneer consumer Web applications for Netscape in 1996. Her current work focuses on leadership for user experience managers and the role of user experience in the changing landscape of product innovation. Janice has been a featured speaker at nearly every Web-centered design conference, from the Nielsen/Norman world tour to South by Southwest Interactive. She is the founder of four startup companies and was previously managing editor for IDG Communications. For many years Janice taught interaction design at San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program. Although Time magazine once called her a "grizzled and cynical veteran" of the dot-com era, she remains an unapologetic champion of user-centered design as a value-producing investment.

Bobby and Jeff Beaver conceived the idea and model for Zazzle, together with their father Robert Beaver, while still student at Stanford University. Working jointly, the brothers engineered the entire Zazzle website, which first launched in 2003. Bobby and Jeff continue to guide company vision and direction, while sharing responsibility for day to day operations. As VP of Technology, Bobby is responsible for all of Zazzle's software and hardware architecture and implementation and has played a key role in developing Zazzle's manufacturing technologies and fulfillment processes. Bobby holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Stanford University.

As VP of Products, Jeff's deep passion for the online consumer directs the website experience and drives feature and product innovation. He has played an integral role in many other aspects of the company, including research and development, manufacturing, and customer service. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Stanford University.

Professor Tom Byers focuses on education regarding high-growth entrepreneurship and technology innovation. At Stanford University since 1995, he is the first holder of the Entrepreneurship Professorship endowed chair in the School of Engineering, and is also a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He has been a faculty director since the inception of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), which serves as the entrepreneurship center for the engineering school. Byers is co-author of the widely used entrepreneurship textbook “Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise,” along with Professors Richard Dorf (UC Davis) and Andrew Nelson (University of Oregon). Byers was the director and lead principal investigator of the Epicenter, which was funded by the National Science Foundation to stimulate entrepreneurship education at all U.S. engineering and science colleges. He has been a member of advisory boards at Harvard Business School, UC Berkeley, World Economic Forum and Conservation International.

Prior to Good Technology, Mr. Shader served as a Vice President and General Manager at Amazon.com, which he joined upon the company's acquisition of Accept.com, a company he co-founded and led as CEO. Accept.com was the first consumer-to-consumer, Internet-based, payment services provider. Mr. Shader's involvement in both Accept.com and Good Technology resulted from his two experiences as an entrepreneur-in-residence with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital. Previously, he served as Vice President of Partner and Developer Relations at Netscape Communications Corporation, where he also built Netscape's international marketing team. Before joining Netscape, he served as Vice President of OEM Sales and Business Development at Collabra Software, Inc., which Netscape acquired, and worked for GO Corporation, a pioneer in pen computing. Mr. Shader received a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from University of California at Berkeley, and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Tim Draper is founding partner of leading venture capital firms Draper Associates and DFJ. His original suggestion to use viral marketing in web-based email to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail, YahooMail and Gmail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by thousands of businesses. Venture successes include Skype, Overture, Baidu, Tesla, Theranos, Parametric Technology, Hotmail, Digidesign, Twitch.tv and hundreds of others. As an advocate for entrepreneurs and free markets, Draper is regularly featured as a keynote speaker in entrepreneurial conferences throughout the world, has been recognized as a leader in his field through numerous awards and honors, and has frequent TV, radio and headline appearances. He was ranked 52 on the list of the 100 most influential Harvard alumni, and seven on the Forbes Midas List. He was named Always-On #1 top venture capital deal maker and has been awarded the Commonwealth Club's Distinguished Citizen Award for achievements in green and sustainable energy. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Roger McNamee is a Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners. Prior to Elevation, Roger was a co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, the leading private equity fund focused on technology and related growth industries. He was a member of Silver Lake's Investment Committee and was involved in all aspects of that partnership. Prior to Silver Lake, Roger was a co-founder of Integral Capital Partners. Integral is a leading technology investor in late-stage venture and public company investments. Founded in 1991 by Roger, John A. Powell, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Integral pioneered the crossover investment strategy, which seeks maximum capital appreciation by making investments in expansion-stage private companies and growth-stage public companies in the technology and life science industries. Prior to founding Integral, Roger managed the T. Rowe Price Science & Technology Fund and co-managed the T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund, which was at that time the largest emerging growth fund in the U.S. Roger serves as a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, an overseer of the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College, and a director of the Rex Foundation. Roger holds a B.A. from Yale College and an M.B.A. from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College.

Geoffrey Moore is a best-selling author and venture partner at MDV. Recognized for his expertise in market development and business and investment strategies, he serves as an advisor to many of MDV's portfolio companies, drawing upon best practices derived from his extensive work with technology startups. Geoffrey has made the understanding and effective exploitation of disruptive technologies the core of his life's work. His books, Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, and Living on the Fault Line are best sellers and required reading at leading business schools. Highly regarded as a dynamic public speaker, Geoffrey is the founder of The Chasm Group and currently is managing director of TCG Advisors. Earlier in his career, he was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high tech marketing strategy and communications company, and for the decade prior, a sales and marketing executive in the software industry. He holds a bachelor's degree in literature from Stanford University and a doctorate in literature from the University of Washington.

Brook Byers has been a venture capital investor since 1972. He has been closely involved with more than forty new technology based ventures, over half of which have already become public companies. He formed the first Life Sciences practice group in the venture capital profession in 1984 and led KPCB to become a premier venture capital firm in the medical, healthcare, and biotechnology sectors. KPCB has invested in and helped build over 90 Life Sciences companies which are developing hundreds of products to treat major underserved medical needs representing huge markets in the nearly two trillion dollar healthcare sector. Brook was the founding President and then Chairman of four biotechnology companies which were incubated in KPCB's offices and went on to become public companies with an aggregate market value over $8 Billion. He is currently on the Board of Directors of eight companies, most recently joining CardioDX, Genomic Health Incorporated, Five Prime Therapeutics, Nanofluidics and XDx, Inc.. He was formerly a Director of Idec Pharmaceuticals (Chairman), Athena Neurosciences (Chairman), Signal Pharmaceuticals, Arris Pharmaceuticals, Pharmacopeia, Ligand Pharmaceuticals (Chairman), Hybritech (Chairman), Genprobe, Nanogen, and others. These companies have pioneered the medical uses of molecular biology, monoclonal antibodies, molecular diagnostics and genomics. Brook was President and a Director of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists and is a contributing author to the book "Guide to Venture Capital". He is currently a Board member of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Foundation, the California Healthcare Institute, the New Schools Foundation, Stanford's Bio-X Advisory Council, the Stanford Eye Council and TechNet. He is Co-Chair of the current five year, $1.4 billion, UCSF Capital Campaign. He was formerly a Director of the Entrepreneurs Foundation, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco , the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council, That Man May See (UCSF) Vision Research Foundation (Chairman) and the Georgia Tech Advisory Board. Raised in Atlanta , Georgia , Brook graduated in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and received an MBA from Stanford.

Peter Fenton joined Benchmark Capital in 2006 after spending seven years as a partner with Accel Partners. Fenton currently sits on the boards of DotCloud, EngineYard, HortonWorks, Lithium, New Relic, Polyvore, Revinate, Twitter, Yelp, Zendesk and Zuora. His previous investments include Coremetrics (acquired by IBM), FriendFeed (acquired by Facebook), JBoss (acquired by RedHat), Reactivity (acquired by Cisco), SpringSource (acquired by VMWare), Terracotta (acquired by Software AG), Wily Technology (acquired by CA), Xensource (acquired by Citrix), and Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo!). Fenton holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business School, as well as a BA from Stanford.