Team

Randy Adams is a serial entrepreneur who has founded six venture-backed startups in the last 25 years in Silicon Valley. Adams received his undergrad degrees from MIT in Electrical Engineering. Some of his accomplishments are:

• Co-founded the popular comedy video site, Will Ferrell’s funnyordie.com
• Director of Engineering for Adobe, led design team for Acrobat and PDF formats
• Secured the initial venture funding for Yahoo, Inc. from Sequoia Capital
• Served on the Yahoo Board of Directors during its first year of operation
• Originated the eBay drop off store concept, founded AuctionDrop, Inc.
• Founded the first Internet Shopping site, the Internet Shopping Network
  
• Designed and developed the first PC desktop publishing app, PFS First Publisher

Adams lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Nicole and their seven children.

Dr. Taher Elgamal is a leading expert in computer, network and information security. Taher is currently the Chief Security Officer of Axway, was the Chief Technology Officer of Tumbleweed Communications, was the Founder/Chair of Securify, and was the Chief Scientist of Netscape. He is recognized in the industry as the “inventor of SSL”. He wrote the base algorithm used in SSL and helped establish SSL as the Internet Security standard within standard committees and within the industry.

Taher invented several industry and government standards in data security and digital signatures area including the DSS government standard for digital signatures. Several thousand publications have been written in the space referred to as “the Elgamal Cryptography”. He developed security software that was used in commercial products by approximately ten companies as well as in the DSS government standard for digital signatures.

Taher has public Board of Director experience with RSA Security, hi/fn, Phoenix Technology and Tumbleweed. He has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Neil Hunt has served as Netflix Chief Product Officer since 1999. Neil leads the Web site development team that has designed and continuously improves the Netflix site, which has been ranked eight consecutive times by ForeSee Results as the #1 rated Web site for customer satisfaction. Neil’s focus on customization and personalization ensures every Netflix member a unique experience every time they visit the site. This includes the movies they see on each page, the recommendations they receive on movies, and the critical account management tools they use, such as their dynamic queue to order movies.

Proprietary, algorithmically-driven software provides the service and competitive differentiation that have made Netflix one of the most prominent and admired brands on the Internet and has helped revolutionize the way consumers make home entertainment choices. On an average day the site facilitates about two million queue adds and processes more than two million movie ratings.

Neil is an accomplished scientist who excels at leading development teams to create powerful software that is reliable and easy to use. He honed that ability through research at Schlumberger Palo Alto Research Laboratory and a decade in the software industry.

Beginning in 1991, Neil was responsible for the architecture and evolution of Purify and other developer tools for Pure Software while Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was its chief executive. Rational Software Corp. acquired the firm in 1997. Neil then served as director of engineering for Rational, managing development of TeamTest, TestStudio, Visual Test and other software testing tools.

Neil earned his doctorate in computer science from the University of Aberdeen, U.K., in 1986. During and afterward, he conducted research in several Palo Alto corporate laboratories. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Durham, U.K.

Richard Lowenthal is the CEO of Coulomb Technologies, which he co-founded in 2007. From 1998 until 2007 he was instrumental in starting several companies, including Lightera, Pipal Systems and Procket Networks. From 1996 to 1997, Mr. Lowenthal was vice president and general manager of Cisco’s WAN Access Products Division. From 1990 through 1995, Mr. Lowenthal was vice president of research and development for StrataCom, a telecommunications equipment company. Prior to StrataCom, Mr. Lowenthal was co-founder and vice president of engineering for Stardent Computers, and vice president of engineering for Convergent Technologies.

Mr. Lowenthal is also a former Mayor of Cupertino, California, and has been heavily involved in the non-profit world. He has a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Dan Lynch, is a private investor and retired bum. He is a co-founder of CyberCash, Inc.. He also founded Interop which highlights the technology of the Internet. As a member of ACM and ISOC, Lynch is active in computer networking with www.lynch.coma primary focus in promoting the spread of the Internet. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute.

He has three active investments these days. The first one is a service for businesses to archive Web content, Iterasi. The second is a service for everyone that allows you to choose a single password to access all Web sites, Usable Security. The third is CollabRx, a company dedicated to saving lives by accelerating the discovery of effective therapies and permanent cures.

He was Director of Computing Facilities at SRI International in the mid to late 70’s. He formerly served as manager of the computing laboratory for the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI, which conducts research in robotics, vision, speech understanding, automatic theorem proving and distributed databases. While at SRI he performed initial development of the TCP/IP protocols in conjunction with Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN).

As Director of Information Processing Division for the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey (USC-ISI) Lynch led the Arpanet team that made the transition from the original NCP protocols to the current TCP/IP based protocols. He directed this effort from 1980 until 1983. It was the last corporate job he ever had. Things were happening out in the world and he wanted to be in that new game. A few educational stumbles occurred before he started Interop in 1986.

Lynch received undergraduate training in mathematics and philosophy from Loyola Marymount University and obtained a Master’s Degree in mathematics from UCLA.

Dr. Raj Reddy is the Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford from 1966-69 and a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon faculty since 1969. He served as the founding Director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 to 1991 and the Dean of School of Computer Science from 1991 to 1999.

Dr. Reddy’s research interests include the study of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. His current research interests include Million Book Digital Library Project; Fiber To The Village Project; and Learning by Doing.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence from 1987 to 89. Dr. Reddy was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Mitterand of France in 1984. He was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1994, the Okawa Prize in 2004, the Honda Prize in 2005, and the Vannevar Bush Award in 2006. He served as co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001.

Rob Rodin is the chairman and CEO of RDN Group; strategic advisors focused on corporate transitions, customer interface, sales and marketing, distribution, and supply chain management. (Customers include GM, GE, US Navy, Siemens, and Simon and Schuster). He is Vice-Chairman of the board at CommerceNet and also serves on the company’s Executive committee.

For over 10 years, Mr. Rodin served as CEO and president of Marshall Industries a global, industrial, electronics distributor and supply chain management company with over $2 billion in sales. The company managed more than 2,500 employees, 500 suppliers, 300,000 part numbers, and 77,000 customers in 36 countries. Customers and suppliers included Intel, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, IBM, Toshiba, and Siemens. Quality and customer demands required compliance with many disciplines, including Six Sigma, ISO 900X, Malcolm Baldridge, Total Quality Management, and Deming’s Total Quality System.

At Marshall Industries, Mr. Rodin engineered the company’s reinvention, turning a conventionally successful $500 million distributor into a Web-enabled $2 billion global competitor. He lead the enterprise design, resulting in a complete transformation of the company’s organizational structure and entire IT platform (and interface modules), as well as the complete development and implementation of the following systems: enterprise resource planning, materials requirement planning, forecast and demand planning, customer relationship management, supplier relationship management, employee relationship management, and an automated storage retrieval warehouse. All of these solutions were required to interface seamlessly with the company’s global customer base and Marshall’s joint venture partners.

Additionally, Mr. Rodin created Marshall’s website, recognized two years in a row as the “World’s Number One Business-to-Business Website” by Advertising Age Magazine. Moreover, Information Week Magazine highlighted Marshall Industries as the “World’s Number One Company in the Use of Technology;” CIO Magazine recognized Mr. Rodin as one of the “Top 100 Leaders for the New Millennium;” UCLA presented him with the “Information Systems Award for System Leadership;” and the University of Connecticut presented Mr. Rodin with the “Distinguished Alumni Award” and elected him to the “University Hall of Fame.”

Mr. Rodin’s best selling book, Free, Perfect and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands, chronicles the radical transformation of Marshall Industries. The changes he led have been case studies examined at Harvard Business School, Columbia University, USC, MIT, and Stanford University. The transformation was also covered by CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune Magazine, and reviewed in several books, including The New Economic by W. Edwards Deming and Customer Intimacy by Fred Wiersema.

After the sale of Marshall Industries to Avnet Inc., Mr. Rodin lead the spinout of several new start up companies, raising $94 million and bringing to market many of the company’s IT and Internet properties. These companies now provide extended supply chain management tools for the electronic industry.

Mr. Rodin’s numerous board of directors activities include:

• CommerceNet—vice chairman
• Napster (formally Roxio)—compensation committee chairman and audit committee member
• SupplyFrame—board member
• SM&A—board member and governance and nominating committee member
• Cyber Coders—board member
• University of Southern California Marshall School of Business—board of leaders
• The ALS Therapy Development Institute—board member and compensation committee chairman
• Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission—advisory board member
  

Mr. Rodin formerly served on the board of directors at Inter-Tel and RosettaNet, the planning committee for the Harvard and Stanford president seminars (YPO), the Advisory Board of Distribution at the University of Southern California, the board of advisors at the University of Connecticut School of Business (Executive Council and Strategic Development committee), and the advisory board at Electronics Supply & Manufacturing magazine (CMP Publications). He also served as a trustee of the W. Edwards Deming Institute and the president of the National Electronic Distribution Association’s (NEDA) education foundation.

Dr. Jay M. (“Marty”) Tenenbaum, a world-renowned Internet commerce pioneer and visionary, founded CommerceNet in 1994 to accelerate business use of the Internet; he remains its Chairman.

He co-founded Veo Systems (1997), the company that pioneered the use of XML for automating business-to-business transactions. When Commerce One acquired Veo Systems in January 1999, Dr. Tenenbaum became chief scientist and was instrumental in shaping the company’s business and technology strategies for the Global Trading Web.

Post Commerce One, Dr. Tenenbaum was an officer and director of Webify Solutions (sold to IBM in 2006) and Medstory (sold to Microsoft in 2007). Currently, his focus is on transforming healthcare and accelerating therapy development through collaborative e-science. Towards that end, he founded CollabRx, which builds “virtual biotechs” to help slash the time, cost, and risk of developing new therapies.

Prior to CommerceNet, he was founder and CEO of Enterprise Integration Technologies, the first company to conduct a commercial Internet transaction (1992), secure Web transaction (1993), and Internet auction (1993). Earlier in his career, Dr. Tenenbaum was also a prominent AI researcher, and led AI research groups at SRI International and Schlumberger Ltd.

Dr. Tenenbaum is a fellow and former board member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a former consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He currently serves as a director of Efficient Finance, Patients Like Me, and the Public Library of Science, and is a consulting professor of Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon’s new West coast campus.

Dr. Tenenbaum holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Stanford.

Dr. Doug Tygar is Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and also a Professor of Information Management at UC Berkeley. He works in the areas of computer security, privacy, and electronic commerce. His current research includes privacy, security issues in sensor webs, digital rights management, and usable computer security. His awards include a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, a teaching award from Carnegie Mellon, and invited keynote addresses at PODC, PODS, VLDB, and many other conferences.

Doug Tygar has written three books; his book Secure Broadcast Communication in Wired and Wireless Networks (with Adrian Perrig) is a standard reference and has been translated to Japanese. He designed cryptographic postage standards for the US Postal Service and has helped build a number of security and electronic commerce systems including: Strongbox, Dyad, Netbill, and Micro-Tesla. He served as chair of the Defense Department’s ISAT Study Group on Security with Privacy, and was a founding board member of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce. He helped create and remains an active member of TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Security Technologies). TRUST is a new National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center with headquarters at UC Berkeley and involving faculty from Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Stanford, and Vanderbilt.

Before coming to UC Berkeley, Dr. Tygar was tenured faculty at Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Department, where he continues to hold an Adjunct Professor position. He received his doctorate from Harvard and his undergraduate degree from Berkeley.

Eric Rescorla, the founder of RTFM, is a recognized expert in Internet Security and Distributed Systems. With Allan Schiffman, he was the designer of Secure-HTTP, the first web security protocol. He was Principal Engineer at Terisa Systems where he was the creator of the company’s SecureWeb Toolkit. He is the author of SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems (Addison-Wesley 2001).

CommerceNet is an entrepreneurial research institute that invests in exceptional people with bold ideas, freeing them to go beyond the domain of traditional research labs and venture funds. They use the power of the Internet to transform existing processes—making them better, faster and more efficient.

The Comany’s current areas of interest are: 1) changing healthcare by industrializing therapy development and 2) fixing Internet security by putting users first.

The Entrepreneurs' Fund III (TEF3 ) is a Silicon Valley based seed and early stage venture fund. Their sole focus is on next generation/Web 2.0 software. It is the latest in a series of successful early stage funds which include The Entrepreneurs' Fund (TEF), The Entrepreneurs' Fund I (TEF1), The Entrepreneurs' Fund II (TEF2) and The Entrepreneurs Growth Fund (TEGF).

Since inception in 1989, the TEF family of funds has been an early stage investor in over 30 very successful companies including; Commerce One, Inc., (IPO), Sybase, Inc. (IPO), Genesys, Inc. (acquired: Alcatel), AvantGo, Inc. (IPO), Aurum Software, Inc. (IPO), Sagent Technology, Inc., (IPO), Pilot Network Services, Inc. (IPO), Resound Corporation (IPO), Intraware, Inc. (IPO), Eyeonics, Inc. (acquired: Bausch and Lomb), SenoRx, Inc. (IPO), and Webify Solutions, Inc. (acquired: IBM).