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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.
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.
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.
This month’s Founders Spotlight features Playkast. Playkast’s Interactive Video Platform let’s anyone take their website’s video content and turn it into an interactive experience. Playkast is powering the online auditions for the TV show Family Feud. Playkast also enables online video contests, conversations, collections & challenges.
Ethan Stone
by Ethan Stone, Stone Business Law
First, a quick but important clarification: I’m not your lawyer and this answer doesn’t establish an lawyer-client relationship. I’m giving a generic answer to a generic question to educate the users of this site.
Bill Reichert
by Bill Reichert at Garage Technology Ventures
Endless articles, books, and blogs have been written on the topic of business plan presentations and pitching to investors. In spite of this wealth of advice, almost every entrepreneur gets it wrong. Why? Because most guides to pitching your company miss the central point: The purpose of your pitch is to sell, not to teach. Your job is to excite, not to educate.
Since founding Sequoia Capital in 1972, Don Valentine has financed many of the companies (Apple, Oracle, Electronic Arts, NVIDIA, Cisco, Google, YouTube, etc.) that have been Silicon Valley’s biggest technology and business success stories. In this View From The Top, he describes some of the insights that allowed him to lead Sequoia through almost four decades of disruptive changes, creating several new industries along the way.
Nicholas de Wolff
by Nicholas de Wolff, founder of deW Process
Over the past 10 years or so, we have been subject to an escalating swath of socially suffocating technological wizardry. It seemed as if we had to “adopt” a new piece of hardware or software every day, and it has been boggling our minds on an ever-overwhelming basis. Many have opted to “opt-out”, and are happily ignorant of many or all the fantastic advances available to them: the mobile weather apps, Smartphones, advanced networks, streaming media, 3D TVs, ebooks, tablets, subcutaneous bar codes (ok, I made that last one up…maybe).
