Startup Launch Pad Judging

Gamiel Gran joined Sierra Ventures in 2008 as Vice President of Business Development. Gamiel leads the Business Development Strategy for the Firm including the development of external advisory boards such as the Sierra Ventures CIO Advisory Board, Sierra Strategic Advisory program, partnerships with services providers such as Angel investors, recruiters, venture banking, and law firms, and the Entrepreneur-in-Residence program. Gamiel develops lead sources for the firm and is focused on the broader software sector – including cloud computing, open source, collaboration, and application enabling software.

Gamiel brings 25 years of operational experience to Sierra Ventures with executive roles in Business Development, Corporate Development, Sales Operations, and Channels and Alliances. Prior to joining Sierra in 2008, Gamiel was Vice President Global Channels & Business Development at Cassatt, Vice President Global Channel Sales at Edify, Vice President Strategic Alliances at BEA, and Vice President Business Development at Asera. He also spent four years at Oracle in Channel Sales and ten years at IBM in Business Development and Sales. Gamiel holds a BA in Economics/Social Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Roger Ehrenberg is the founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Kinetic Trading Strategies, a technology firm that has developed a unique platform for performing back-testing, simulation and roll-forward analysis on models consuming massive volumes of structured and unstructured data.

Prior to forming IA Ventures, Roger was an active angel investor through IA Capital Partners, a seed-stage investment firm focused on digital media and financial technology. From 2004 to 2009, Roger seeded 40 companies, including bit.ly, Buddy Media, Clickable, Invite Media (sold to Google), Magnetic, MyTrade (sold to TD Ameritrade), Solve Media, Stocktwits, TheLadders, TweetDeck and Wallstrip (sold to CBS Interactive).

Roger currently sits on the boards of BankSimple, Kinetic Trading Strategies, Metamarkets, Recorded Future, and The Trade Desk, and is a Board observer of SaveWave. Formerly, he served on the boards of Alphacet, Buddy Media, Global Bay Mobile Technologies, Magnetic, Selerity and Stocktwits.

Earlier in his career, Roger served as President and CEO of DB Advisors, LLC, Deutsche Bank’s internal hedge fund trading platform where his 130-person team managed $6 billion in capital across multiple strategies with offices in New York, London and Hong Kong. Before DB Advisors, Roger was Global Co-head of Deutsche Bank’s Strategic Equity Transactions Group. In 2000, Roger’s team won Institutional Investor magazine’s “Derivatives Deal of the Year” award. As an Investment Banker and Managing Director at Citibank, Roger held a variety of roles in the Global Derivatives, Capital Markets, Mergers & Acquisitions and Capital Structuring groups.

Roger holds an MBA in Finance, Accounting and Management from Columbia Business School and a BBA in Finance, Economics and Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Roger blogs at http://informationarbitrage.com and tweets at @infoarbitrage.

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Alistair has been an entrepreneur, author, and public speaker for nearly 20 years. He’s worked on a variety of topics, from web performance, to big data, to cloud computing, to startups, in that time. In 2001, he co-founded web performance startup Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011), and since that time has also launched Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, the Bitnorth conference, the International Startup Festival and several other early-stage companies.

Alistair is the chair of O’Reilly’s Strata conference; Techweb’s Cloud Connect; and the International Startup Festival. Lean Analytics is his fourth book on analytics, technology, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Montreal, Canada and tries to mitigate chronic ADD by writing about far too many things at Solve For Interesting.

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