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Our advisory board members specialize in a variety of industry domains, including software, Internet, telecommunications, electronic content, academia, industry analysis, global markets, and executive management.
Mike Brochu
CEO of Global Market Insite and former President and CEO of Loudeye Corp. (NASDAQ: LOUD) based in Seattle, Washington. Loudeye was sold in 2006 to Nokia and was a leader in digital media solutions and the outsourcing provider of choice for companies looking to maximize their return on a digital media investment. Mr. Brochu assists Voyager with deal flow sourcing and in mentoring its portfolio company executives. He brings over 20 years of executive management experience in emerging growth technology, software, and digital entertainment companies to Voyager Capital. Prior to joining Loudeye, Mr. Brochu served as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Primus Knowledge Solutions, Inc., a NASDAQ-traded e-business and eservice solution provider. He was instrumental in engineering the 2004 sale of Primus to Art Technology Group (NASDAQ: ARTG) to create the industry’s most complete e-business solution platform. Prior to joining Primus, Brochu was the President of Sierra On-Line Inc., one of the world’s largest publishers of interactive entertainment, educational, and home productivity software. At Sierra On-Line, Mr. Brochu led efforts to grow revenues by over 300 percent, leading to the sale of Sierra On-Line to CUC International for $1.1 billion. He currently serves on the board of ART Technology and Emphysis Medical Management. He received his bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance from the University of Texas.
John DeFeo
President and CEO and a Director of CoCo Communications based in Seattle, Washington. Mr. DeFeo has been a member of the Voyager Advisory Board since its inception. He is a seasoned CEO with more than 28 years of broad senior management experience in strategic planning, marketing, customer care, six Sigma methodologies, manufacturing, and product/business development. Mr. DeFeo’s experience touches nearly every facet of the telecommunications and medical device industries, including start-ups, managing hyper-growth, restructurings, global partnerships, turnarounds, and mergers and acquisitions. He has extensive experience in complex capital financings, having raised more than $1 billion in private, venture, and public markets. Under his leadership, U.S. West NewVector’s cellular business grew from start-up to profitability, with one million subscribers, $1 billion in revenues, and covering over 60 domestic markets with 3,000 employees. NewVector’s market cap was valued at $8.5 billion when it was sold to AirTouch. He has managed negotiations and formed alliances with some of the most recognized global corporate partners, including Ericsson, Fluor Daniels, Harris, Hyundai, Lucent, MCI Corp., Motorola, Nortel, and Sony Corp. Mr. DeFeo has been recognized for his effective management style and leadership skills on multiple occasions, including three U.S. West Chairman Awards. He has both electrical engineering and business degrees from Temple University.
Frank Gill
Former senior executive from Intel Corporation, joined Voyager’s Advisory Board in early 2004 and is based in Portland, Oregon. He has been instrumental in referring attractive investment opportunities, assisting with due diligence on investment opportunities, and working with several of Voyager’s portfolio companies. Mr. Gill began his career at Intel in 1975 and over the course of 23 years held a variety of sales, marketing, product development, and manufacturing leadership positions, retiring from Intel as an Executive Vice President in 1998. In 1988, he served as the Senior Vice President in charge of worldwide sales and marketing operations and became General Manager of the Intel Systems Group in 1990 and the Internet and Communications Group in 1995. He currently serves on the boards of Tektronix (NYSE: TEK) and private company, Kryptiq. He formerly served on the boards of Inktomi, McAfee.com, Logitech International (NASDAQ: LOGI), ITXC Corporation (NASDAQ: ITXC), Pixelworks, Inc. (NASDAQ: PXLW) and Sequent Computer Systems. Mr. Gill holds a B.S.E.E. degree from the University of California at Davis.
Jeremy Jaech
President and CEO of Trumba, has founded and led two successful and market-creating software companies in the past 20 years. Jaech was co-founder of Visio Corporation, the developer of the first mass-market business drawing and diagramming software, and served as its President, CEO and Chairman of the Board from 1990 until its acquisition by Microsoft Corporation in 2000. Post acquisition, Jaech served as Vice President of the Business Tools Division at Microsoft until June 2000. Prior to founding Visio Corporation, he co-founded Aldus Corporation, the first company to create design software for graphics arts professionals using personal computers and laser printers. At Aldus, Jaech was the technical leader for the original development of PageMaker and went on to serve as Vice President of Engineering, managing Aldus' product development. Aldus was acquired by Adobe in 1994. Jaech serves on the Board of Directors of Seattle-based RealNetworks, Inc. and of Alibre Inc., a privately funded company located in Richardson, Texas. He holds a BA in mathematics and an MS in computer science from the University of Washington.
Ed Lazowska
Holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Lazowska helps advise Voyager on the future direction of technologies and with investment sourcing. Dr. Lazowska joined the UW faculty in 1977. His research and teaching focus on the design, implementation, and analysis of high performance computing and communication systems. He served as the Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at UW from 1993 to 2001, and subsequently led the $42 million fundraising effort for UW’s recently dedicated Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. In recent years Dr. Lazowska has served as the Chair of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Science and Technology Study Group, Chair of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and co-Chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. He is a member of the Technical Advisory Board for Microsoft Research, and a board member of Data I/O Corporation, the Washington Software Alliance, and others. He received his A.B. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.
Kendra VanderMeulen
President of the Seattle Christian Foundation and joined Voyager Capital’s Advisory Board in 2005. Kendra recently served as executive vice president, Mobile at InfoSpace, and is an active board member or advisor to a variety of companies in the wireless Internet arena, including BSQUARE (NASDAQ: BSQR), NetMotion Wireless, Kineto Wireless, and Sonim Technologies. Kendra joined AT&T Wireless (formerly McCaw Cellular Communications, now Cingular) in 1994 to lead the formation of the wireless data division. Prior to McCaw, Kendra served as COO and president of the Communications Systems Group of Cincinnati Bell Information Systems (now Convergys). She also held a variety of business and technical management positions at AT&T in the fields of software development, voice processing, and signaling systems. Kendra received a BS degree in mathematics from Marietta College and a MS degree in computer science from Ohio State University. She is the recipient of the 1999 Catherine B. Cleary award as the outstanding woman leader of AT&T.
Tim Buckley
Has spent his career developing startup companies into successful businesses and has held executive positions in sales and operations. Most recently from 1999 to 2003, Tim was the COO for Red Hat, the world's premier open source and Linux provider. Prior to Red Hat, Tim was senior vice president of worldwide sales at Visio Corp., where he was involved in growing the company from a startup to a public company that was later acquired by Microsoft in 1999 for $1.3 billion. Prior to Visio, Tim held executive positions at Approach, a windows database company that was sold to Lotus Development Corp; Aldus, the company that pioneered Desktop Publishing software and went public before merging with Adobe Corp.; and Decision Resources, a business graphics software company that was sold to Ashton Tate. Tim has a B.S. in Political Science from Penn State.
Fran Dramis
Recently served as Chief Information and eCommerce Officer for BellSouth Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia where he was responsible for all information technologies and for directing the company’s eCommerce efforts. Dramis joined BellSouth in December 1998, coming from CIO Strategy, Inc., a Clifton, Virginia-based information technology consulting firm. As a consultant, and often as a transitional CIO, Fran led the major technology transformation efforts at firms such as Coopers & Lybrand, Citibank, NASD, and Bankers Trust. Fran spent much of his early career with AT&T, including Bell Labs, rising to the position of executive director of information product management. He left AT&T to become president and COO of Telic Corporation. From Telic he went to be the managing director and CIO to rebuild Solomon Brothers’ technology organization. Fran serves on the boards of Avocent Corporation, webMethods, Inc., and RealOps, Inc. Fran received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University and a Master of Science from Pace University in New York City.
Naren Gupta
Managing Director of Nexus India Capital and Vice Chairman and Director for Wind River (NASDAQ: WIND) based in Alameda, California. Wind River is the global leader in device software optimization (DSO) and embedded device operating systems. Prior to becoming Vice Chairman for Wind River, Dr. Gupta co-founded and was a Director of Integrated Systems, Inc. (ISI), where he was President from ISI´s formation in 1980 to 1994, as well as CEO from 1988 to 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in November 1991. Dr. Gupta also serves on the boards of Digital Link Corporation, a data communications and wide-area networking equipment manufacturer, TIBCO Software (NASDAQ: TIBX), and RedHat (NYSE:RHT). Dr. Gupta holds an M.S. in engineering from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford University.
Promod Haque
Managing Director of Norwest Venture Partners, a venture capital firm with over $2 billion under management based in Palo Alto, California. He was named by Forbes magazine as a Midas Investor from 2002 to 2006. Haque focuses on investments in enterprise software and communications technologies. He was an early investor and a board member of Cerent Corporation (acquired by Cisco), Siara Systems (acquired by Redback Networks), OnDisplay (acquired by Vignette), and Winphoria Networks (acquired by Motorola). He seeded Extreme Networks in 1996. Other notable investments and previous board seats include Tivoli Systems (acquired by IBM), Forte Software (acquired by Sun Microsystems), Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape Communications), Information Advantage (acquired by Sterling Software), Resonext Communications (acquired by RF Micro Devices), Showcase Corporation (acquired by SPSS) and ZettaCom (acquired by IDT). Prior to Norwest Venture Partners, Haque spent 18 years in various operational roles ranging from product development, marketing, COO and CEO at various public and private companies — Dimensional Medicine, Inc., Emergent Technologies, Siemens International, and Thorn EMI. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Delhi, India. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Northwestern University and an M.B.A. from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where he serves on the advisory board.
Keith Krach
Currently the CEO of 3points, LLC, an investment holding company based in Los Gatos, CA. Krach co-founded Ariba in 1996, serving as CEO for the first 5 years of Ariba’s history and Chairman of the Board for 7 years. Under his leadership as CEO, Ariba not only pioneered B2B, but also grew rapidly to become the dominant global player in the ever-evolving business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce industry. During his tenure as CEO, Krach took Ariba public, ultimately achieving a market capitalization of $34 billion and becoming one of the fastest growing software companies in history. In honor of his accomplishments in e-business, Ernst & Young named Krach the 2000 National Entrepreneur of the Year, the same year in which he was honored at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the Technology Pioneer Award. Prior to Ariba Krach joined the founding team of Rasna Corporation as the Chief Operating Officer. Krach helped lead Rasna to be recognized as #3 on the Inc. 100 list of Fastest-Growing Companies. Rasna was sold in 1995 to Parametric Technologies (PMTC on NASDAQ) for $500 million. Krach then became the first entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital where he assembled the team to form Ariba in 1996. Krach also spent 10 years at GM where he was GM’s youngest-ever vice president, going on to spearhead GM’s first-ever Japanese joint venture, GMF Robotics. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of XoJet, Collabnet, Microposite, Tropos, Ooma and serves on the Board of Trustees at Purdue University. Krach earned his B.S. degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Harvard University.
Roger McNamee
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, a director of the Rex Foundation, Move, and Forbes Media LLC. Roger holds a B.A. from Yale College and an M.B.A. from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College.