Eric Di Benedetto

Eric Di Benedetto has been a professional investor in software start-ups in Silicon Valley for the last two decades. The aggregate market capitalization of companies Eric sponsored as an angel investor or venture capitalist reached several billion dollars at the time his investments were realized. Eric was profiled in Business Week ("Go West, Young Whiz"), in The European ("Where the Brains Drain"), and in The Red Herring ("Growing Wings").

After a successful career as a venture capitalist, Eric established Active Starts as an angel investment firm focused on the coaching and financing needs of San Francisco Bay Area software entrepreneurs within a year from product launch. Active Starts leads or participates in investment syndicates whose mission is to bridge start-up companies to market validation. Once a market opportunity has been proven, more traditional venture capital firms usually follow in subsequent rounds of financing.

The Active Starts portfolio is invested in two sectors, the social web and on-demand applications. Eric's goal is to help build several category-defining companies which will keep creating substantial shareholder value in the long run and become world leaders in their respective fields as "platform companies". Some portfolio companies already have proven they are capable of reaching this star status as demonstrated by their ability to win numerous industry awards. ClairMail won the 2006 Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) Codie Award for Software Newcomer of the Year, the Red Herring 100 Award and the Red Herring 100 Global Award. Clickability won the 2008 SIIA Codie Award for Best Content Management Solution and several of its executives have now joined the Executive Council Boards of the SIIA. RealTravel won the 2007 Atlas Award for the Best Online Travel Community and many other industry awards. LendingClub won the 2008 Webby Award for best banking site in the US while it was in registration with the SEC to become the first social lending platform regulated by the SEC. And Xactly was named the World's Best New Company in 2008 by International Business Awards after being the first company ever to win the Nation's Best New Company Award by American Business Awards two years in a row in 2007 and 2008.

Currently, the financial services industry is of specific interest to Active Starts as it is undergoing a process of creative destruction providing a very fertile environment for innovation brought from the outside (Schumpeter's theory). ClairMail, LendingClub, Plastyc and RapLeaf are examples of companies backed by Active Starts to either serve constituencies neglected by incumbent financial service providers (Plastyc payment-enables the 13-25 demographic), increase credit market efficiencies (LendingClub), provide better insights on customers (RapLeaf), or execute on a strategic imperative (ClairMail brings mobility to banking and payments). In the near future, the application of algorithms to a cloud computing architecture is expected to present investors with compelling opportunities to bring additional levels of optimization to various segments of the financial services industry.

Eric sits on the boards of directors of Blue Chip Expert, Clickability, IdeaBlade, Plastyc, RapLeaf and RateItAll.

Before co-founding Convergence Partners, a Silicon Valley based information technology venture capital firm, in 1997, Eric was the managing director of US venture capital funds managed by BANEXI, the merchant banking arm of BNP (Banque Nationale de Paris, now BNP Paribas), including a joint partnership with Robertson Stephens & Co. Prior to his venture capital career, Eric was a workout and restructuring specialist with the PARGESA/Lambert Brussels Group, and a mergers and acquisitions associate covering defense electronics for Bankers Trust Company (now Deutsche Bank).

Eric holds an MBA degree from ESSEC, Paris, France, and a BA in mathematics and physics.

Antoine Blondeau, Advisor

Antoine Blondeau is an executive and investor in technology companies in California and Greater China. He has over 18 years of leadership experience in technology marketing worldwide, as CEO, senior officer and director/advisor of publicly-traded companies, start-ups, turnarounds and medium-to-large businesses.

Antoine's career highlights include working with the Tokyo representation of the French Prime Minister's DATAR unit to negotiate the setup of Mitsubishi Electric, Canon, Toshiba and Sony's industrial facilities in France, and a 4-year stint at Nortel Networks where he headed the OEM and Asia/Pacific unit of the company's digital wireless terminals business. Antoine was also president & COO of Zi Corporation, a developer of intelligent user interface software listed on Nasdaq, and CEO of Dejima, Inc., a developer of distributed artificial intelligence software, which he sold to Sybase, Inc. In addition, Antoine worked at salesforce.com, the leader in on-demand enterprise applications as vice president in charge of the wireless and mobile business unit, and at Visto Corporation as senior vice president in charge of worldwide business development and head of Asia/Pacific. He is actively involved with two of Eric Di Benedetto's portfolio companies – IdeaBlade, Inc. as a director and management coach, and Kalat Software, Inc. as an advisor.

Antoine holds an MBA from the Paris Graduate School of Management (ESCP), France and has studied at the Faculties of Economics and Commerce of Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan.

Georges Culioli, Advisor

Georges Culioli has been a top management executive and advisor specializing in corporate restructuring and international business development for the last 10 years. Some of his assignments have included the position of acting CEO of SPORTFIVE (S5, formerly Groupe Jean-Claude Darmon), Europe’s leading sports rights marketing company, CEO of VU Net USA, Vivendi Universal’s US Internet Group, acting COO of PageOne Communications Ltd, a leading paging/call center company in the UK, and EVP of Olivetti Computers Worldwide, a European PC manufacturer and distributor.

Georges also spent seven years at Booz Allen Hamilton where he was appointed a partner. He began his career as a guest researcher with the National Bureau of Standards in the United States, and as a consultant on energy and transportation with the World Bank.

Georges earned a M.S. in general engineering from the Ecole Nationale des Mines de Paris, and an MBA degree from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Michael Graves, Advisor

Michael Graves is the CEO of JanRain whose mission is to provide identity services that help users securely manage, control and innovate with their own digital identities based on the emerging OpenID protocol - one username, one password for all of the sites you go to on the Internet.

In 1998 Michael founded Signio, Inc., an e-commerce provider of payment services for internet merchants. The company was seeded by Eric Di Benedetto and Robb Wilmot as the sole Series A investors. Signio was sold to VeriSign for $1.5 billion a few years later where it grew to be the dominant provider for online payment services on the web. After the acquisition of Signio, Michael worked in a variety of technical and business development roles at VeriSign. As the CTO of VeriSign's Labs, he was engaged in VeriSign's research and development efforts that focused on universal identity systems for Internet applications.

Michael abandoned college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988 to work for Guy Kawasaki in what became ACIUS, Inc, a spinout from Apple Computer. Michael's focus on compilers, cryptography and distributed systems led to development and architectural positions at a number of Silicon Valley software leaders, including Symantec, NeXT, IBM and Forte Software, prior to a sabbatical which led to the founding of Signio.

Michael is the co-author of 4 patents related to PKI, digital identity and network commerce.

Patrick McNenny, Advisor

Patrick McNenny has been chief financial officer or vice president, finance with three start-ups funded by Eric Di Benedetto (Full Degree, OneMediaPlace and Decisive Technology) in addition to being a provider of financial services to two others (IdeaBlade and Clickability). In the case of Full Degree and Decisive Technologies, Patrick was instrumental in helping close on the sale of both companies to larger acquirers. Full Degree and Decisive Technologies were acquired for stock respectively by Amphire, a privately owned company, and MessageMedia, a company publicly traded on NASDAQ.

Patrick McNenny is an accomplished financial executive with over 17 years of experience with technology start-ups, financings, mergers and acquisitions, financial planning and analysis, operations, project management, human resources, accounting and audit.

Patrick has been a financial consultant to Cisco Systems (CSCO), IdeaBlade (.NET rapid application development), Magink (display technologies), Snocap (digital licensing and copyright management for the music industry) and Way2Be (corporate apparel and merchandise).

Earlier on in his career, Patrick served in the venture group which wrote the business plan for Loral CyberStar, a satellite provider of high-speed media services. Patrick was appointed controller for CyberStar, a subsidiary of Loral (LORL) where he played a key role in development and financing as well as accounting and administration of the company.

Patrick started his career as an auditor with the Defense Contract Audit Agency of the United States Department of Defense before joining McDonald’s Corporation as an accountant responsible for the financial reporting of 90 company-owned restaurants.

Patrick received a B.S. in business administration/accounting from the University of Montana. He is a licensed Certified Public Accountant (CPA).

Pierre Rodocanachi, Advisor

Pierre Rodocanachi is the managing director of Management Patrimonial Conseil, an investment advisory firm. He is also is Chairman of the Strategic Committee of Booz Allen Hamilton, an international management and strategy consulting firm. He joined the group in 1973 and in 1979 became CEO of the French subsidiary. In 1987, he was appointed Senior Vice-Chairman and became a member of the Strategic Committee and of the Operations Committee of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., and manager of all the activities for Southern Europe. In addition, Pierre is a member of the Supervisory Board of Vivendi Universal and the Chairman of its Human Resources Committee.

Pierre is a Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in France (Chairman from 1997-2000), the Aspen France Institute, and the Institut du mécénat de solidarité (Treasurer). He is a member of the French Olympic Medals Association and a recipient of both the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and the National Order of Merit.

Prior to joining Booz Allen Hamilton, Pierre began his career as a researcher in a solids physics laboratory at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Then, for five years, he managed the planning department of the French General Delegation for Scientific and Technical Research (DGRST). From 1969 to 1971, he served as Technical Consultant on scientific matters for the Minister of Industry and, from 1971 to 1973, was the Deputy Director for the National Agency for Research Valuation (ANVAR).

Pierre holds a degree in physics from the Paris Faculté des Sciences, France.

Robb Wilmot, Advisor

Robb Wilmot's career highlights include serving as CEO at the 33,000-employee ICL PLC. He also spent 15 years at Texas Instruments, where he was named one of the youngest vice presidents in the company’s history. Robb consulted for numerous Fortune 1000 technology companies on business transformation and developed aggressive, "professional" angel-investor portfolios in Silicon Valley. He has co-founded seven successful companies since 1986 and has been the lead seed, or A-round investor, in 20 more, resulting in seven IPO’s and nine strategic acquisitions.

Robb earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Nottingham University in the U.K. He has received three honorary doctorates and was named Commander of the British Empire in recognition of returning ICL PLC to profitability.