Investors
Storm Ventures
Storm Ventures was founded by a seasoned group of industry veterans with the common vision of sharing our collective experience, passion and energy to help talented and driven entrepreneurs build great companies of enduring value. Storm Ventures focuses on seed and early stage information technology companies which best leverages their operational perspective and experience and enables them to add value in the critical early stages of a company’s development.
Sierra Ventures
Sierra Ventures, founded in 1982, is a privately held venture capital firm focused on Information Technology investments. Sierra Ventures has managed nine venture capital partnerships and currently has more than $1.5 billion of capital under management.
eBay, Inc.
eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) connects millions of buyers and sellers globally on a daily basis through eBay, the world’s largest online marketplace, and PayPal, which enables individuals and businesses to securely, easily and quickly send and receive online payments. We also reach millions through specialized marketplaces such as StubHub, the world’s largest ticket marketplace, and eBay classifieds sites, which together have a presence in more than 1,000 cities around the world.
TransLink Capital
TransLink Capital is a U.S. based venture capital firm focused on investments in early to expansion stage startup companies in Mobile, Communications and Digital Media sectors. While most of the market leading customers and partners for these three sectors are located in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, start-ups tend to lack the resources to develop their business in these countries. Managing Directors at TransLink Capital are truly "native" in both the U.S. and their countries of origin — Japan, Korea, and Taiwan — and have extensive experience in both venture capital and business development in these three countries. This unique collection of talent enables TransLink Capital to "translate" market and cultural differences and "link" U.S.-based start-ups to partners and customers in Northeast Asia.
Mayfield Fund
Mayfield Fund invests in relationships with entrepreneurs, institutions, and the community to transform bold ideas into industry-leading companies. With $2.7 billion under management, Mayfield invests primarily in early stage U.S. companies in the Enterprise, Consumer, Energytech, Semiconductor and Telecom sectors. Over its 42 year history, the firm has invested in more than 500 companies resulting in over 100 IPOs and more than 100 mergers or acquisitions.
Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with more than 70 offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with cloud, virtualization, applications, management, storage and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide.
Board Members
Ryan Floyd
General Partner, Storm Ventures
Ryan Floyd is a founding member of Storm Ventures. At Storm Ventures, Ryan has focused on enterprise IT, internet and web infrastructure opportunities. He has invested in both semiconductors and components (MetaRAM, SandForce, and Ignis Optics/acquired by Bookham), as well as well as software (Appcelerator, DeviceVM, Netforensics, Yieldbuild and Kidaro/acquired by Microsoft.) Ryan received his B.S. and M.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University.
Tim Guleri
Managing Director, Sierra Ventures
Tim Guleri is a Managing Director of Sierra Ventures, a Menlo Park, California, venture capital fund. Sierra’s nine portfolios of venture investments have committed capital exceeding $1.5 Billion. Tim’s investment focus is Information Technology Software companies attacking large underserved markets. Additionally, Tim has helped execute on Sierra’s India strategy and investments. Mr. Guleri currently serves as a Director of Sourcefire (Nasdaq: FIRE) and MakeMyTrip.com (Nasdaq: MMYT) and private companies including Approva, Code Green Networks, DotNetNuke, Red Aril, Runa, Makara and Appcelerator. Prior to Sierra, Mr. Guleri was the founder and CEO of Octane Software and held executive management positions at Scoput Technology. Tim holds a MS in Robotics and Industrial Engineering from Virginia Tech, and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from India.
Larry Augustin
Board Member
Larry Augustin is an angel investor and advisor to early stage technology companies. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Appcelerator, Compiere, DeviceVM, DotNetNuke, Fonality, Hyperic, Medsphere, Pentaho and SugarCRM. One of the group who coined the term “Open Source”, he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. Worth Magazine named him to their list of the Top 50 CEOs in 2000. From 2002 to 2004 he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners. In 1993 he founded VA Linux (now SourceForge, NASDAQ:LNUX) serving as CEO until August 2002. While CEO he launched SourceForge.net and led the company through an IPO in December 1999.
Toshi Otani
Co-Founder and Managing Director, TransLink Capital
Toshi Otani is a co-founder and Managing Director of TransLink Capital. Toshi has over 20 years of experience in management of and investment in high-tech companies. Toshi started his career at Mitsubishi Corporation, the world’s largest trade and investment firm, where he was in charge of multiple investment and business development projects in the IT industry. Subsequently, Toshi served as President of Hikari Tsushin’s VC operation in the U.S. where he managed a six person investment team in their Palo Alto office. Toshi directly led Hikari Tsushin’s investments in successful companies such as WebEx (NASDAQ: WEBX, acquired by Cisco) and SiRF (NASDAQ: SIRF). Prior to TransLink Capital, Toshi served as Senior Vice President of Everypath Inc., founding its Japanese subsidiary and serving as its General Manager and Representative Director, where he grew Asian operations from one person to a team of over 20 professionals, which generated over 60% of Everypath’s worldwide business for five consecutive years.
Jeff Haynie
CEO and Co-Founder, Appcelerator, Inc.
Jeff Haynie is Co-Founder and CEO of Appcelerator. Jeff is a long-time serial entrepreneur, technologist and blogger. Previously, Jeff was Co-founder and CTO of Vocalocity, a software provider in the communications arena and before that, CTO of eHatchery, a digital incubator and off-shoot of Bill Gross’ idealab!. Jeff has worked on numerous standard committees such as IETF and W3C as well as core contributor to a number of important open source technologies such as JBoss and OpenVXI. Jeff served with distinction in the U.S. Navy. Jeff blogs at http://blog.jeffhaynie.us and can be found on twitter @jhaynie.
Nolan Wright
CTO and Co-Founder, Appcelerator, Inc.
Nolan leads engineering and product management at Appcelerator. Before co-founding Appcelerator, Nolan led engineering and product management for Vocalocity, a VoiceXML platform company. Nolan started his career at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), and then went to work for Netscape. Nolan graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Electrical Engineering.
