Investors

Irwin Gross  [ Worldview Technology Partners ]

Irwin Gross has more than a decade of experience working with high technology enterprises as an advisor, strategist, and investor. He focuses on investments in software, systems, and services companies. Irwin joined Worldview from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he co-founded the firm's nationally recognized intellectual property counseling practice and served as a manager of the firm's venture capital fund. As part of this practice, Irwin leveraged his extensive intellectual property expertise to assist companies in developing new market strategies, products, and revenue streams. Companies for whom Irwin has worked include a host of successful venture-backed firms, such as Brocade, Avanex, VMware, RealNetworks, and Netscape, as well as large technology enterprises such as EMC, Broadcom, and Hewlett-Packard. Irwin received a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Mitchell Kertzman  [ Hummer Winblad Venture Partners ]

Mitchell Kertzman is a Partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. He has over 30 years of experience as CEO of public and private software companies. Most recently, Mitchell was chairman and CEO of Liberate Technologies, a provider of platform software for the delivery of digital services by cable television companies. Before joining Liberate, he was chairman of the board and CEO of Sybase, Inc. Mitchell was founder and CEO of Powersoft, which merged with Sybase in February 1995 (at that time, the most valuable merger in the history of the software industry). Mitchell was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is currently a director of CNET.

Roger Sippl  [ Sippl Macdonald Ventures ]

Roger Sippl has a rich history of both starting companies and investing in the winning efforts of other entrepreneurs in the data management enterprise software industry, and currently invests though his own investment entity, Sippl Investments, LLC. Previously Roger was founder and CEO of Informix Software, where under his direction Informix pioneered SQL relational databases, 4GL application development tools and OLTP database technology before being acquired by IBM. Sippl was also co-founder of The Vantive Corporation, founder and CEO of Visigenic Software, Chairman and CEO of Above All Software and currently serves on the boards of Interwoven and Demand Reports. Other notable investments in this area include Illustra, Versata, BroadVision, SupportSoft and Rearden Commerce. He earned a B.S. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.