The Crossmine Team
Bob Nelson - Launch CEO
Bob is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in business development. He joined his first venture funded company in 1987 in Washington, D.C. He hit his sales quotas but the company bombed because it was overfunded. He has never made that mistake again. Bob was a co-founder and CEO of the pioneering voice email company, CrossMedia Networks, which was later sold, and joined Network Solutions as a consultant in 1999 prior to its sale for $21BB to VeriSign where he became the Entrepreneur-in-Residence in their Ventures Group in Northern Virginia. In 2002, he started the East Coast branch of the St. Louis-based voice authentication company, TradeHarbor, and serves on its board and as Vice President of Partner Development. Earlier in his career he worked at Satellite Business Systems and MCI, and also for a Congressman, 2 U.S. Senators, and a retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Bob lives in McLean, Virginia and devotes 10% of his time to raising funds for worthy charities, political candidates, and his sons’ schools. He graduated from the University of Nebraska with a B.Sc. in Business Administration.
Bill Livingston - Launch COO
Bill is a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in engineering, operations, and finance. He joined his first venture funded company in 1984. Bill was later COO of the speech research products company, Entropic, which was acquired by Microsoft in 1992. Bill was a co-founder of CrossMedia Networks and directed its industry leading MyInBox service that allowed consumers to retrieve and manage their email over their cell phone using only their voice in 1997. CrossMedia was acquired by a UK Telematics firm after the Blackberry came along. Bill then consulted to the VeriSign Ventures Group and helped research and develop their Global Voice Registry offering during the boom. In 2002, he joined TradeHarbor as their Vice President of Services Architecture and Deployment and has led pilots with some of the world’s leading financial services companies allowing their customers to be authenticated by their voices. Bill lives in Herndon, Virginia. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a BSEE and from the George Washington University with an MSEE.
Barg Upender - Launch CTO
Barg is a serial entrepreneur and technologist with 20 years of experience in commercial software product development. He brings expertise and passion for building and launching easy-to-use Internet applications. Barg started his career by writing games and applications for the Atari and Apple computers. He later developed technology prototypes for jet engines, automobiles, and elevators at United Technologies. In 2007, Barg co-founded Intridea, a leading Ruby on Rails web application development firm based in Washington, D.C. Prior to Intridea, Barg was the President of Concentric Methods, an Agile Software Development company. Barg is also a founding member of NeoDiagnostix Inc, a biomarker-based cancer diagnostic company. Barg graduated from Cornell University with a Masters in Electrical Engineering.
Liddy Manson - Launch Advisor
Liddy Manson is a seasoned Internet and new-media executive who has held senior positions in interactive media for over 15 years. Most recently, she was the COO of Freewebs. In that role she oversaw the business operations of the company, including sales, marketing, programming, and human resources. Before joining Freewebs she was a vice president and general manager at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online division of The Washington Post Company. During her 9 years at WPNI, she held several senior roles including vice president of Strategy and Business Development, and vice president of Advertising and Marketing, responsible for washingtonpost.com's and newsweek.com's revenue and audience growth initiatives. Prior to WPNI, she was vice president of Special Projects for Discovery Channel Multimedia and in Strategy and Business Development for Electronic Arts. Ms. Manson earned an MBA and Certificate in Public Management from Stanford University and received a BA in Music from Yale University. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, and three children, but, unable to relinquish her New England roots, remains a rabid Red Sox fan.
Paul Erickson - Advisor
Paul has been one of the telecom's industry's top strategists, contributing a number of innovations that shaped the telecom landscape. He was the founding CEO and chairman of SunRocket, which emerged as the nation's second largest residential Internet phone company. Earlier, he created several market-leading services during his 16-year tenure with MCI Communications, capitalizing on his unique understanding of market opportunities, technology, regulation, industry economics and competition. Paul managed MCI's market research and competitive analysis, identifying distinct target market opportunities that resulted in new billion-dollar MCI businesses, including 1-800-COLLECT, dial-around long distance services 10-10-321 and 10-10-220, and The Neighborhood, which was the first nationwide all-distance phone service.
Surendra Goel - Advisor
Surendra is an experienced technology executive with over 20 years experience and held executive positions at StreamSage (A Comcast Company) VeriSign, AOL, and PLS. During his tenure with VeriSign, Surendra was responsible for the development of DNS resolution of .com and .net, a system capable of over 4 trillion queries per day. He is adept at recognizing talent and formed and nurtured teams to develop VOIP and Mobile Applications. His technical expertise enabled the development and implementation of infrastructure to monitor, detect, analyze and prevent DDOS attacks on VeriSign’s network applications. Prior to VeriSign, Surendra co-founded Wondir with several other AOL executives. Wondir is an organization with a simple mission: eliminate barriers between questions and answers. Wondir constructed a new and different kind of information service to connect people who have information needs with people and information that can help them. In 2005, Wondir was sold to Revolution Health, a Steve Case (AOL Co-founder) company. Prior to Wondir, Surendra was the Director, Search for AOL. He was responsible for the management and development of AOLSearch, Netscape Search and search engines for other AOL companies and led successful acquisition and integration of two cutting edge technology companies. Surendra is recipient of four patents and few pending in the area of Search Engines.
Daniel Klaussen - Advisor
Daniel is a 20-year veteran of the computer industry. He is a seasoned veteran of managing the design, creation and delivery process of getting exciting consumer software products to the market. His passion is evident in every project he is involved with. He has an in depth knowledge in Collaboration, Messaging, Databases, Internet technologies and more recently, telephony and mobility products. His past positions include Director of Knowledge Management at iXL, Group Product Manager at Netscape (Navigator, Communicator product lines), Sr. Product Manager Collabra Software (Collabra Share) and for Borland International (Paradox). Daniel enjoys consulting on a regular basis with startup companies and other challenging software projects. He is a full time dad and enjoys teaching kids robotics, programming and electronics and is an avid Adventure Racer. Daniel studied Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Michael R. Nelson - Advisor
Michael is an Internet visionary with 20 years of experience in government and the private sector laying the foundation for Next Generation Internet technologies. He joined the Senate Commerce Committee in 1988 and worked closely with Senator Al Gore as the lead Senate staffer on the High Performance Computing Act. In 1993, he followed Gore to the White House, where he worked in the Office of Science and Technology Policy as the Special Assistant for Information Technology. Then, after spending a year and a half at the FCC as Director of Technology Policy, in 1998 he joined IBM as the Director of Internet Technology and Strategy where he helped define and implement IBM’s Next Generation Internet strategy. In early 2008, Michael became a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University where he teaches and does research on the future of the Internet, Internet standards, and the evolution of the Information Society. Michael graduated from Caltech with a B.Sc. in Geology and from MIT with a Ph.D. in Geophysics.
Scott Suhy - Advisor
Scott is a veteran executive with 20 years of experience in building organizations, driving revenue, and increasing market share. He developed his first software at Texas Instruments in 1987 and later consulted to IBM via CTG inc.. He became a consultant to Microsoft in 1992 and in 1998 became the General Manager for the Midamerica Sales District for Microsoft in St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to Washington, D.C. in 2003 to be the General Manager for Public Sector Business Development. Scott directly managed a team responsible for complex Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Defense and Education opportunities and was also responsible for leading Microsoft’s Dynamics (ERP/CRM/Supply Chain) sales team. Currently, he is consulting to a number of US based startups. Scott graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering.
Jim Hunt - Backer
A seasoned veteran of the technology industry, Jim has founded and run four successful technology companies over the past twenty years. He founded and served as President and CEO of Ernst & Young Technologies, Inc., leading it to $75 million in profitable sales after just three years of operation. He then orchestrated the sale of EYT in late 2000 to Cap Gemini and served as President of the newly created Cap Gemini Technologies. Prior to his work at EYT and Cap Gemini, Jim ran a number of firms including BDS, Inc., a systems integrator focused on sales to the federal government. In addition to his primary responsibilities as a line executive, he has helped launch and advise over a dozen companies in the high technology sector, with particular focus on software for federal and commercial markets. Much of his expertise has been directed at federal government market penetration for software application companies, system integrators, and IT service firms. Jim cofounded MITA Group, which provides a unique blend of business, technology, government policy, and political expertise to their clients, in 2006, and currently serves as a Partner specializing in federal sales acceleration for early stage companies with products and services to sell to government.
William McLucas - Backer
Bill is one of the most sought-after advisors to public companies, boards of directors, audit committees and special committees dealing with corporate crises and related issues. He represents public companies, investment banks, accounting firms and advisors to mutual funds facing Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. Chambers USA: America's Leading Lawyers for Business describes Mr. McLucas as "the preeminent SEC enforcement lawyer in the country." In 1977, Mr. McLucas joined the Securities and Exchange Commission's Division of Enforcement, where he rose through the Division to serve as Director of Enforcement for eight years—longer than any other Enforcement Division Director in Commission history. Mr. McLucas led the Division's Staff in numerous high-profile investigations and landmark enforcement actions, including settlement of the SEC’s cases against Michael Milken, hundreds of insider trading cases and numerous inquiries involving public companies, accounting firms and investment banks. He joined Wilmer Hale in 1998 and is the chair of the firm's Securities Department and a member of the Securities Enforcement Practice Group. Bill graduated from Penn State with a B.A. and from Temple University Beasley School of Law with a J.D.
Jim Rutt, JPR Ventures - Backer
Jim has been involved as an early-stage investor and/or advisor to numerous technology-based companies, and has either founded or played a key role in several significant information services and network companies. He invented the term "snail mail" in 1981 and cofounded First Call in 1984 and sold it to the Thomson Corporation in 1986. He founded Thomson Labs in 1994 with a major focus on the Internet, natural language processing, knowledge management, and related technologies. From 1999 to 2000, Jim was CEO of Network Solutions, where he led the company through a successful $2.1 billion secondary offering, and ultimately engineered its $17 billion acquisition in 2000 by VeriSign. He was Researcher in Residence from 2002 to 2004 at the Santa Fe Institute, studying the application of complexity science to financial markets, social simulations, agent based models, and evolutionary artificial intelligence. He is currently the Principal of JPR Ventures which provides private equity investments in early stage technology companies. Jim received his B.S. degree in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Management at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is on the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute and is on the National Advisory Board of the Stanford Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Tom Spahr, Libra Ventures - Backer
Tom has a 20 year record of leadership in the development of software technology and in growing companies. He was a co-founder of MicroStrategy and became its Vice President of Information Systems and Chief Information Officer. In 2001, he began making independent investments in early stage companies. He is currently President of Libra Ventures, LLC, a start-up web applications design company and also serves as Vice President of Jex Technologies which is focused on automating health care logistics. Since 2006, Tom has served on the Board of Directors of MicroStrategy (MSTR). In 2007, Tom agreed to lead the seed round of CrossMine, Inc. to help the company build out its vision of creating a directory of technology companies based on advanced search, geographic mapping, social networking, database, and textmining technologies. Tom graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an S.B. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Andy Lustig, Lawyer
Andy is a Partner at Cooley Godward in Reston, Virginia
Sean Stone, Banker
Sean Stone is a Senior Vice President at Silicon Valley Bank in Vienna, Virginia
