Board of Directors

Jnan Dash

Former Group Vice President, Oracle Corporation

Jnan Dash is a technology visionary and executive consultant in Silicon Valley. He focuses on enterprise solutions such as virtualization, real-time events, real-time Business Intelligence, Service Oriented Architecture, Web Services, open source, and transactional Web (Web 2.0). He spent ten years at Oracle Corporation and was the Group Vice President, Systems Architecture and Technology till 2002. He was responsible for setting Oracle's core database and application server product directions and interacted with customers worldwide in translating future needs to product plans.

Mr. Dash is a well-known expert in the software industry. Prior to joining Oracle in 1992, he spent 16 years at IBM in various positions including development of the DB2 family of products and in charge of IBM's database architecture and technology. Mr. Dash is a frequent speaker at industry forums around the world on the future of software technology. He has a Bachelor's degree in Engineering and Master's degree in Systems Design from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He sits on several boards and advisory boards of companies. He is also a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE) of Silicon Valley.

Mark Hoffman

Founder Sybase, CommerceOne

Mark Hoffman has been recognized as a leading entrepreneur and innovator of new technologies for more than twenty-five years. Mark founded Sybase in 1984, serving as its Chairman, CEO and President and growing the business to $1 billion in revenues in 1995. His many accomplishments at Sybase included the development of the relational database for high-performance networked applications in the client/server environment. He founded Commerce One in 1996 where he played a central role in establishing software standards for electronic commerce. While serving as Chairman, CEO and President of Commerce One until 2004, he directed the development of infrastructure software connecting complex commercial processes into a centralized marketplace for global 1000 companies.

Mark’s entrepreneurial vision continued at Everdream, Inc., where he served as Chairman, CEO and President from 2005 to 2007. During this time he repositioned the company as a pure Software as Service (SaaS) desktop management provider, and re-architected the product to be a major IT Service platform with massive scalability. Mark holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Arizona. He served on a number of technology Boards and Organizations, including the Pacific Research Institute (1997-2006), University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management Advisory Board (1998-current), the European Technology Fund, (1998-2003) and others.

Puneet Gupta Founder and CEO

Connectbeam, Inc

Puneet Gupta is a seasoned technology executive and entrepreneur with over 15 years of marketing and operations experience at both large and small technology companies. Most recently, he was CEO of CourseCafe, an online social collaboration application company enabling researchers around the world to work together online on academic and coursework-related research.

Puneet was Director of Product Marketing at Selectica (NASDAQ: SLTC) - an enterprise sales and solutions pricing software company, helping to grow the company from 70 employees to over 900, with one of the top ten IPOs in Nasdaq's history, and guiding it into new industry verticals with innovative solutions, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions. He has also held marketing and product development positions at Peoplesoft, and Oracle Corporation, where he brought several new products to market. He received the Best Innovative Product of the Year award at Oracle.

Puneet holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Ohio State University, Management of Technology from UC Berkeley, and an MBA from Columbia University in New York.

Jim Long Venture Advisor

Gabriel Venture Partners

Jim brings with him many years of experience and success in building businesses in the high technology industry, as well as in developing new technologies and patents for the Internet and PC environments. He is currently a "Venture Advisor" for Gabriel Ventures where he also sits on the Boards of Aurora BioFuels and YLX, Corp

Since 2003, Mr. Long has been an advisor for several start-ups such as Ruckus Wireless (WiFi video), Skipper Wireless (mesh nets & VoIP), Coghead (SaaS for the long tail), and Jibe Networks (acquired by Citrix).

Previously, Mr. Long was the CEO of RioPort, a leading music application service provider (ASP) via its digital distribution infrastructure and MP3 player software. RioPort, powered MTV.com, Best-Buy.com, Yahoo, HP, Nike.com, and Microsoft; was the first Internet Company to license digital songs for resale from all five major record labels and enabled the first music cell-phones via a partnership with Nokia. Before joining RioPort, Mr. Long was the CEO and Founder of Starlight Networks. Starlight pioneered video streaming and video multicasting with award-winning Intranet video infrastructure software and coined the term, "streaming video". Mr. Long is known as the "father" of that industry. Starlight provided Internet video communications products for Fortune 2000 businesses including Smith Barney, General Electric, Bloomberg, Viacom, Disney, Harvard, and Peoplesoft.

Starlight Networks was the leader in the corporate video streaming market when it was acquired by PictureTel in November 1998. Later, he helped transition the business to PictureTel by developing a SaaS business strategy. Mr. Long has also worked with various venture capital firms and start-ups. He was instrumental in the successful turn-around of Tolerant Systems to Veritas Software, a leader in the storage management software market. Mr. Long began his career in software development and product marketing at Hewlett Packard where he invented the first presentation graphics application. Later, he spent four years as a venture manager for Fred Adler Venture Capital.

Mr. Long holds an MBA with Distinction from Harvard University and a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Bob Rees General Partner

Startup Capital Ventures

Bob is an experienced venture capitalist with a 20-year track record of forming, incubating, funding, and growing successful young companies. His background also includes marketing, sales, and strategic planning positions with two Fortune 500 companies (Mobil and Tenneco).

As a Special Limited Partner of Woodside Fund from 1993 to 1999, Bob built a successful investment record including exits for Innova Corporation, Hotrail, and AccelGraphics. Bob and three of his Woodside Fund partners left the firm in 1999 to form Access Venture Partners. As a Managing Director of Access Venture Partners until 2004, Bob sourced technology deals in Texas, Colorado, and Oklahoma and syndicated these deals with top-tier venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. At Access, Bob led the firm's investment in Cashworks, which was later sold to General Electric Card Services.

Prior to his venture roles at Woodside Fund and Access Venture Partners, Bob led the successful diversification of Rees/Source Ventures, Inc., a family-owned oil and gas business, through creation of a venture capital investment program. In 1987, he launched the Oklahoma City Innovation Center as Oklahoma's first privately run business incubator. He also played an active role in helping the state develop its own entrepreneurial and venture capital initiatives, which culminated in the founding of the Oklahoma Capital Investment Board (OCIB) and Oklahoma Technology Commercialization Center (OTCC).

Bob is a board member of QuanTEM Labs and Heartland Homes, two Oklahoma companies originally incubated by the Oklahoma City Innovation Center. At Startup Capital Ventures, he serves on the boards of directors of Xignite and Connectbeam.

Bob holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Principia College and an MBA in Marketing from New York University's Stern School of Business.