| Tom Garland Tom founded ACT Venture Partners Inc. after the conclusion of Acuitive, a pioneer in the work for equity "sweat capital" portfolio model. During it's 10 year history, Acuitive worked with over a hundred companies and enjoyed over 30 liquidity events. Tom specializes in working with early stage companies developing new market business strategies, partnership opportunities, strategic alliances, distribution programs and lighthouse sales deals with large recognized brands in vertical markets. Often this work helps companies earn critical industry validation for their technology and has significant valuation impacts. He has helped a number of international companies establish a presence in the US, particularly in the Silicon Valley. Tom is currently SVP of Marketing and Business Development for Snaptell. Tom recently completed an interim CEO role for EverNote culminating in a successful Series A financing and as CMO of Catalyst Mobile. Between ACT Venture Partners and Acuitive portfolio companies, Tom has been active in many start-up companies including Attune Systems, Chelsio Communications, Centrify, Consentry Networks, InQuira, Matisse Networks, Neoscale Systems (sold to nCipher), ObserveIT, Topspin Communications (sold to Cisco), SnapTell, Soundpipe (sold to Comdial), SJLabs (sold to YMAX Magic Jack), and Tacit/Illumio Software (sold to Oracle). Tom has also worked with large established companies such as Extreme Networks/Avaya and Juniper Networks. He has recently completed a number of M&A due diligence projects for a number of investment banks, leveraged buy-out firms and large corporations. Prior to Acuitive, Tom was formerly a General Partner of The Venture Operations Group working alongside venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in early stage private companies. Tom has been a Business Development and Marketing executive in the Silicon Valley for over 18 years. He has put together technology alliances, partnerships and transactions with some of the most significant brands in the world including such partners as Disney, Eastman Kodak, ABC Networks, Nintendo, CNNSI, MTV, Yahoo, AT&T, ESPN, Intel, Cox Cable, Hasbro, Vonage and Sun Microsystems. He spent four years as an executive from early stage through IPO at HearMe/Mpath (Nasdaq:HEAR) in various roles, including Vice President of Network Programming and Business Development. Prior to that, Tom spent over eight years at SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics) in numerous product marketing, business development and sales roles in the Advanced Systems Division and the OEM Products Division, working in the supercomputing, high performance graphics and distributed computing (servers and storage) markets. In addition, Tom was a founding member of the management team of Silicon Studio (SGI's entertainment company). Tom has an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is based in the Silicon Valley and can be reached at 408-867-5624 or tgarland ACTventurepartners.com Steve Farnworth Steve is currently the President of Spectrum Consulting. Spectrum helps companies assess their product/market/architecture needs and develop comprehensive implementation plans. Our engagements range from short-term strategic gap analysis, to get-well projects to long-term architecture/product development. Projects accomplished by Spectrum include: a two year project as Chief Storage Architect with i365 (a Seagate Company) to develop the business model and application delivery architecture for Cloud based Data Management/DR SaaS applications; Data Center Market Analysis and MRD for Juniper Networks; Storage Management software system architecture. Prior to Founding Spectrum, Steve was a Vice President at Acuitive Inc., a product/technology consulting firm where he provided strategic product direction and executive leadership to high technology companies in the Silicon Valley. His customers are: Aarohi Communications (Storage virtualization – acquired by Emulex), Netillion (10GigE Network Memory Server – acquired by Cisco), Legare Networks, Silverback Systems (10GE iSCSI Storage acquired by Brocade), RedEye Networks (Security service virtualization), Woven Systems (10GE Ethernet Fabrics, Byte & Switch 2006 Top 10 Startup), Matisse Networks (Scalable Metro Optics), Juniper Networks (Market/competitive analysis) and Hifn, Inc. (Securing data-at-rest throughout the Enterprise). Prior to Acuitive, Steve was the GM of the Mobility Software Division at Symbol Technologies, Inc. He was responsible for the product P&L and software product development. Steve developed the business plan, which became the foundation of the division, and he led the successful acquisition and integration of Covigo Inc. into Symbol. His division’s Mobility Services Platform achieved the Wireless Broadband Innovation Award for “Best Innovation in Wireless Security Management.” Prior to Symbol, Steve was the co-founder, CTO and Sr. VP Engineering at Desana Systems, a data center virtualization company. As the company founder, Steve led the development of the original business plan and raised $52 million from tier one VCs: Sequoia, Mayfield and Worldview. Steve led the development of Desana’s “whole product”: L2-L7 switching system architecture and service level management software that delivered multi-tier transaction recognition and policy/resource based transaction shaping to strict service level agreements. Prior to Desana, he founded Fusion, a multi-million dollar product development firm. The Fusion team produced products for companies such as Brocade Communication Systems which generated over $500 million in revenue over their product life cycle. Fusion’s customers include: Intel, Synopsys, Foundry, Brocade, Pluris, Nokia, Philips, Com21 and Nortel. Prior to Fusion, Steve held multiple advanced development and product development roles. He was a research team leader at the USC/Information Sciences Institute, where he performed computer science research in the areas of networked systems, parallel computing architectures and parallel algorithms. He holds multiple storage and networking technology patents. Mark Hayes Mark’s experience with content delivery began in 2001 at Macromedia. Mark was hired as a consultant to help launch the Flash Communications Server (FCS). The initial launch was successful and it was clear that FCS would become popular with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) as the standard for streaming Flash video. Mark’s success lead Macromedia to hire him as Director of OEM Sales. During his tenure he successfully closed deals with Akamai, Limelight Networks, VitalStream, Speedera and Mirror Image. After the Adobe merger Mark decided to return to his consulting practice and was hired by Vitalstream to design and develop their channel sales program. While engaged there he closed a major OEM deal with Avid/Pinnacle. As VitalStream was being sold to Internap, Mark was recruited by Highwinds CEO, to assist in writing a CDN business plan and product plan for Highwinds. The board of directors ultimately funded the plan and Highwinds today is recognized as a top 5 CDN, and StrikeTracker the user console that Mark helped design is considered “best in class” and won last year’s Streaming Medias Editor’s choice award. While handling both marketing strategy and business development tasks at Highwinds, Mark drove a number of partnership deals with companies like Adobe Systems, Microsoft, Digital Rapids, Viewcast, and many others. He continues to maintain key relationships in the content delivery ecosystem. Travel, including international business, is welcome. |
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ACT Venture Partners Inc.
ACT Venture Partners Inc.
