Advisors
Bill Vass
President and CEO, Lliquid Robotics
William (Bill) Vass is the President and CEO of Liquid Robotics, a well-funded startup company that has developed an entirely new type of unmanned autonomous robotic marine vehicle with wide-ranging applications. Drawing all of its energy from the environment, the Wave Glider platform revolutionizes ocean monitoring, data collection and communications.
Prior to his current role at Liquid Robotics, he was the President and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal (a Sun Microsystems subsidiary focusing on business with government organizations). He held numerous positions during his more than 10 years at Sun, including VP of corporate software services, Chief Security Officer for Sun IT, and Chief Information Officer (CIO). His background has a significant military and government presence, including a stint as an oversight CIO working underneath the Department of Defense's overall CIO. Before that, he was the Chief technical officer and Technical Lead for the U.S. Army's personnel systems.
Vass is a proponent of corporate executives writing a blog, stating in August of 2005 that blogging "allows them to communicate in an unfiltered way." He is also supportive of the open source and Linux communities, having utilized both throughout his career.
James Gosling
Principle Engineer, Google
James Gosling is currently Principle Engineer for Google. He spent 26 yars with Sun Microsystems and is best known as the father of the Java programming language.
Over the years he has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers, as well as text and drawing editors. In Feb 2007, he was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada. The Order is Canada’s highest civilian honour. Officers are the second highest grade.
He received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
He runs a highly active and well attended blog.
Scott McNealy
Former CEO & Founder of Sun Microsystems
Scott McNealy was a founder and CEO and Chairman of Sun Microsystems. He is one of a few CEO's of a major corporation to have a tenure of over 20 years. He is quick to note that his background is business, not technology and is continually challenging the companies he engages with to make their products of high value and easy implementation. Scott has a BA in Economics from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
Max Rayner
Former SVP & General Manager, Reservations Solutions, TravelCLICK
Max is a technology executive with 20+ years of global experience leading Product Development, R&D, SaaS/Cloud Services and IT organizations. He has led both on-demand and software product creation, boosting revenues, building high performance teams, and scaling infrastructure for both B2C and B2B companies.
James Spitze
Executive Director, Fischer CIO Leadership Program UC Berkeley, Chairman Sequoia Strategy Group LLC
Jim is the Executive Director of the Fisher CIO Leadership Program at UC Berkeley and Chairman, Sequoia Strategy Group LLC.
He has served as a CIO for over a dozen prominent companies, including QANTUS, Xerox Data Systems and American President Lines (APL). He is known to specialize in IT executive management issues, defining the role of the CIO, turning around troubled IT projects and serving as a visionary thought leader to the IT profession.
He holds BS and MS, EE & Computer Science degrees from UC Berkeley.
Shahin Khan
CEO Orion Enterprises
Shahin Khan is CEO of Orion Enterprises which helps accelerate the path from an idea to a successful company, with current projects in cyber-security/compliance, and marketing outsourcing where he is a Partner at Orion Marketing. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo Inc., Massively Parallel Technologies, and eXLudus Technologies.
He spent 8 years at Sun Microsystems as Chief Competitive Officer and VP/GM of the HPC business. Shahin was VP of Corporate Development, Intellectual Property, and Marketing at Silicon Graphics, and CMO of Azul Systems. He lived in the UK to lead European Marketing for FPS Computing before its acquisition by Cray Research.
Shahin is a thought leader, specializing in competitive strategy, positioning, M&A, and marketing/sales alignment. He has been quoted or featured in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, BusinessWeek, InformationWeek, The Register, CRN, and Cnet. He is a graduate of Cornell University. He started his career at IBM.
Stuart Evans
Distinguished Service Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Silicon Valley
Dr. Stuart Evans is a Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, where he teaches “Innovation & Entrepreneurship”. He is a board member, educator and author, focusing on dynamic high tech ventures. His professional career spans research (SRI International, Stanford Graduate School of Business,), teaching (The Judge Business School, Cambridge University), consulting (Bain and Company, Menlo Park, California), investing (Sand Hill Venture Group, Menlo Park, California) and executive management (Shugart Corporation, a Xerox subsidiary, Sunnyvale, California). He has published widely on high tech ventures. His latest book Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises (Springer, 2005, second edition, 2009) is co-authored with Prof. Homa Bahrami from the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. The book is based on their collective field research and practical experience in Silicon Valley since 1982. It puts forward a practical toolkit for dynamic adaptation in high tech ecosystems.
