Suzy Taherian

Suzy Taherian has over 25 years of experience as CFO, COO, acting CEO, and board member for global companies. She is currently CFO of 3Degrees, which helps Fortune 500 take urgent action on climate change. She has significant experience in financing and growing emerging industrial technology companies.

At Chevron M&A team, Suzy led over $2Bn in M&A transactions. She drove the turnaround at Chevron Global Lubricants, a $4Bn division of Chevron with activities in over 100 countries. The result was 45% YOY improvement in profitability to achieve $500M annual earnings. She completed $5Bn in complex structured financings in emerging technology areas for Chevron, such as LNG, shale oil, and energy efficiency projects. After 16 years with Exxon and Chevron, she went on to lead high growth industrial companies.

Suzy served on the board of NewHold Investment Corporation, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. She was part of the board audit committee, overseeing their IPO on NASDAQ on July 31, 2020 and their subsequent purchase of Evolv. Other Board experience includes Wrightspeed Inc, World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and Chevron Federal Credit Union, which has over $1Bn in assets.

Suzy has been adjunct professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management for last 10 years, teaching courses on International Finance and International Business. She was awarded Woman CFO of the Year award in 2023 from Finance Executive International – Silicon Valley. Suzy co-authored 80/20 CFO: Making Strategic Transformations in Your company. Suzy holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Davis; an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Ziad Taimeh

Ziad Taimeh is a staff cardiologist in the Section of Heart Failure & Transplantation at The Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular, & Thoracic Institute, at The Cleveland Clinic. His journey began at The University of Jordan School of Medicine in Amman, Jordan, where he earned his medical degree with the honor of an academic scholarship. After completing his medical school training as a visiting student at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in NYC, he stayed on staff for 3 years as an immunobiology researcher. With a solid foundation in both clinical practice and research, Dr. Taimeh took on new challenges by joining the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Texas, where he assumed the role of assistant professor of cardiology. In 2020, he embarked on a new chapter in his career by joining The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

Throughout his career, Dr. Taimeh's commitment to innovation and research has earned him prestigious accolades and awards. Notably, he was honored with The Innovation in Medicine & Engineering Award from the University of Minnesota, and The Young Innovator Award from The American Society of Transplantation. Finally, his work on blood- mechanical heart pump interaction was recognized as a finalist in The Levine Young Investigator Award competition sponsored by the American Heart Association. He remains active as an investigator in several clinical studies addressing heart failure therapies and mechanical heart pumps.

Beyond his clinical and research endeavors, Dr. Taimeh is an angel investor and advisor to health sciences startups. Drawing from his experience, he seeks out promising startups and ventures with the potential to disrupt and elevate the healthcare industry. Outside the walls of the clinic and the virtual meeting rooms, he enjoys the outdoors with his family, gourmet cooking, and visiting with his in-laws in Palm Desert CA.


Muge Tanik

Muge Tanik started her career in the software industry in 1987. She drove software packaging, pricing, marketing, and sales in the emerging countries, as well as in the U.S.Muge joined Intel in 1997 to start up its subsidiary in Turkey. She served asIntel Turkey’s first Country Manager from 1997 to 2000. During her leadership Turkey became the regional HQof the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa region. Muge moved to California in 2000 to serve as the Chief of Staff to the EVP, Sales and Marketing. Since then, she took varies roles in Intel HQ such as managing global ISVs, 4G/5G solutions scale via Intel’s eco-system before she left the company in 2014 to join Walmart.com.At Walmart.com Muge managed a Business Unit (Global Store) to sell “any product from any inventory to any country”. This was completely a new business model and the technology not only for Walmart.com but for all the online retailers. She had full P&L responsibility. Muge returned to Intel in 2017 as the GM of Solutions (Edge, Networking and Cloud solutions) enablement and scale via partners, with a specific focus on GSI’s, CSPs, ISV’s and MSPs. In her spare time, she plays tennis, cooks, loves to walk her dog on the beach and spend quality time with friends and family.

Robert Teng

Robert Teng is a passionate technologist with over 20 years of experience as a Sr. Director of Product Management, Software Development, and ISV/Partner Management with CXOs of large enterprises. He has built Strategic Alliances, Co-Sell/Joint-Selling and GTM programs with Partners including Keynote presentations, sales and account territory mappings and co-marketing programs. In his years of experience, Robert has closed 5-8 Multi-Million dollar deals per year while working with ISVs and Field/Sales teams. His biggest deal was at Siemens valued at $15M over the life of the deal. Recently, Robert has joined Abacus and Trajectus as CTO and bringing his technical experience to grow the Services market share for them. He has built an AI/ML engine using Python,Tensorflow, and other opensource tools and has created a Sales Prediction Engine, Support ticket self-service resolution app, Sentiment Analysis, and Recommendation engine for 136K employees. Robert has also built an Enterprise level Search Engine for Oracle. As an Angel investor, Robert is looking forward to providing insights and guidance to help startups avoid costly mistakes and to hit the ground running.

Andy Tomback

Andrew (“Andy”) Tomback has been an angel and private equity investor for over a decade. He is a litigation partner at McLaughlin Stern LLP and is based in New York. Andrew has over 30 years of experience drawn from business, private practice, and government service.

Before entering private practice, Andy was the Deputy General Counsel of the Resolution Trust Corporation, where he managed several hundred attorneys handling federal savings and loan resolutions. He also served as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Enforcement at the US Department of the Treasury. Earlier in his career, he served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where he conducted grand jury investigations and prosecuted criminal cases, concentrating on complex securities frauds, including stock manipulations, insider trading, and international tax evasion enterprises. He tried 12 cases, all to conviction, and successfully argued over a dozen appeals. Andy also clerked for the Honorable Stanley Sporkin of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Prior to joining McLaughlin & Stern, Andy was Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Scientific Games Corporation (NASDAQ: SGMS). He also practiced litigation at two other global law firms – Milbank and White & Case.

Andy graduated from Yale College summa cum laude in 1982 and Yale Law School in 1986. He is active in non-profits and serves on the boards of: The Andrew Goodman Foundation, which focuses on registering and turning out the youth vote; West Side Campaign Against Hunger (“WSCAH”), a food bank in New York City; Learning through an Expanded Arts Program (“LeAp”), which provides arts classes in underserved areas of New York City; the Exoneration Initiative, which works to reverse unjust convictions and death sentences; Jobs for Homeless People (“JHP”), which he co-founded in 1987 and which helps homeless people find and retain jobs; and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

He is married to Sally Strauss, a senior lawyer at Mount Sinai.  They have three children, Alexandra (28), Drew (24), and Ariel (24).

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Brent Townshend

Brent Townshend is currently doing Synthetic Biology research in Stanford's Bioengineering department. He was formerly CEO of Ordinate Corporation & President of Townshend Intellectual Property. At TIP, Brent was the inventor of the 56k modem, which was subsequently licensed to 3Com, Conexant, IBM & others. Brent has held appointments as a Consulting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University & McGill university. Primary technical interests are biotech, signal processing, software engineering, & intellectual property issues.

Alex Tulko

Alexander Tulko is a seasoned investment professional with experience in the area of venture capital and private equity industries, IT and IoT projects’ development, classical and crypto markets’ asset management experience. Alexander is currently developing his own projects in telemedicine industry (Digital Avicenna), fundraising and BD for several companies as well as helping former portfolio companies (USP Сapital,) in the strategic development, raising the new investment rounds for the company, and negotiating the financing transactions with the new investors and helping the founders in other operational issues.

Alexander was serving as a Managing Director of the USP Capital Ltd. since November 2013, being engaged in organizing the USP Сapital, including identifying potential investments, conducting due diligence and structuring the investments for the Fund. Before that, from November 2007 through September 2013, Mr. Tulko served as a portfolio manager for Troika Dialog Asset Management where he was involved in establishing and managing a private pension fund, negotiating the restructuring of public debt issuances, and launching and managing three mutual funds, and private banking and advisory services for high-net-worth individuals.

From November 2004 through November 2007, Mr. Tulko was employed by Lusight Research Ltd. (part of Goldman Sachs’ Hudson Street service) in Toronto, Canada, where he served as a senior equity analyst focusing on emerging and frontier markets. Mr. Tulko holds a BA in History from Donetsk State University (Donetsk, Ukraine), a MA in Sociology from Central European University (Czech Republic) and a MPM in Financial Management from the University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland, USA).

Dinesh Tyagi

Dinesh Tyagi has 25+ years of engineering, marketing, and sales experience in the semiconductor industry. Dinesh founded Innovative Logic in 2005 with a strong focus on design IP as well as design services for next generation SoCs. Dinesh also has great experience working with top tier 1 clients such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Boeing, Broadcom and small startups for their SoC ASIC/FPGA and Embedded Software solution. Dinesh successfully sold Innovative Logic's IP division to SiFive in 2019. Innovative Logic was acquired by Prodapt North America in 2021. Currently, he is working as Head of ASIC BU at Prodapt.

Prior to Innovative Logic, Dinesh spent around 10 years working with different companies such as Cadence, Synopsys, STMicroelectronics, a CPU startup, Renesas, and Altera in different engineering, marketing, and sales roles. Dinesh brings extensive experience in the newly emerging domains such as AI/ML, AR/VR, IOT, 5G, SSD, Cloud.

Dinesh joined the Band to invest as an angel investor and to network with like-minded investors and entrepreneurs. He also would like to share his broad experience that he gained in the last 25+ years working with multiple clients ranging from top tier1 to many startups. Dinesh holds a master's degree in electronics from Delhi University, India.

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Jacques Vallee

Jacques Vallee is a General Partner with Euro-America Partners, a venture capital fund family. He received his Ph.D. in CS in 1967 from Northwestern University. In the early 70’s Jacques directed the project that built the first computer conferencing system on ARPANET. Under Jacques’ management the three Euro-America funds have invested in over 60 high-technology and medical startups in the U.S., Europe and Israel, with one third of the portfolio companies reaching the public markets through IPOs or acquisitions. Jacques is the author of 50 articles and five books about high technology and finance. He received the Jules Verne award for a science-fiction novel. His latest book, The Heart of the Internet is now available on Google Books.

Dr. Punit Vyas, MD, MHA, FACHE

Dr. Punit Vyas is an accomplished healthcare executive and medical doctor with over 16 years of experience leading operations for major hospitals, healthcare systems, and medical organization sacross the United States and India. His most recent role was serving as the Chief Executive Officer for the highest level of care at a State owned inpatient psychiatric hospital in Minnesota.

A strategic and results-driven leader, Dr. Vyas has a proven track record of optimizing hospital performance, enhancing patient satisfaction, controlling costs, and driving revenue growth. He demonstrates expertise in areas such as staff management, budget administration, quality/safety compliance, strategic planning, and implementing innovative medical programs aligned with organizational goals.

Dr. Vyas is board certified in Healthcare Management as a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (FACHE). He earned his Medical Degree from Seth G.S. Medical College and KEM Hospital in Mumbai, India as well as a Master's in Healthcare Administration from the University of Iowa. Additionally, he has completed professional certifications from renowned institutions like Stanford University and The Wharton School focused on transformative healthcare solutions involving big data, analytics, AI, and machine learning.

With a passion for leveraging cutting-edge technologies to revolutionize patient care, Dr. Vyas has worked closely with software development teams on large-scale digital health projects. He is familiar with AI frameworks, deep learning models for healthcare applications, and EHR data integration.

Dr. Vyas is an advocate for community health education and providing compassionate care to our aging population. His skills in communication, negotiation, and stakeholder relationship management allow him to forge positive connections across diverse groups. As an Angel Investor, he actively supports innovative startups advancing AI adoption in healthcare.

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Bruce Walicek

Bruce Walicek is Principal of Radian Capital Advisors, a firm engaged in advising and consulting with private and public companies on strategy, financing, strategic business development, and M&A advisory. Previously, from 2008 to 2016, Mr. Walicek was the President, Chief Executive Officer, and a Board Director of Pixelworks, Inc. (Nasdaq:PXLW), an innovative provider of video display processing technology. Prior to joining Pixelworks, Bruce was an Executive-in-Residence at Sevin Rosen Funds, a VC firm focused on building leading global technology companies. From 2003 to 2006 Bruce was with Worldview Technology Partners, an IT focused VC firm based in Palo Alto, where he was responsible for sourcing new investments and acting as a board member and advisor for portfolio companies. Before joining Worldview in 2003, he was with Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown’s Global Investment Banking group and led their Semiconductor Investment Banking practice. He joined Alex. Brown in 1996 as the Senior Equity Research Analyst covering the Semiconductor and Electronic Design Automation industries.During his career, he has raised over $3B in financing for large multinational public corporations as well as venture backed startups, including IPOs, secondary offerings, private placements, debt offerings, private equity investments and M&A. Some notable firms include Pixelworks, Transmeta, Atmel, Amkor, ChipPac, Cooper and Cyan (acquired by Cadence) Infineon, Intersil, Level One Communications (acquired by Intel), MEMC, and MIPS Technologies. Before entering the financial services industry in the mid 1990s, he held executive management positions in the Semiconductor industry at Texas Instruments, VLSI Technology, and Cirrus Logic. He started his career at Tracor Inc. in Austin, developing signal processing systems for anti-submarine warfare applications. Bruce holds a Master of Business Administration from Santa Clara University and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Texas State University. He earned the ISS Public Director Certification through the Directors’ College Executive Education Program at Stanford University.

Dr. Justin Wang

Dr. Justin Wang is an accomplished international technology marketing executive with over 25 years of experience in the semiconductor, renewal energy, and photonicsindustries. Dr. Wang is graduate fromPrinceton University with Ph.D., MA, and MSdegrees. Through his career, he worked with international technology companiesincluding Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company(TSMC) and MediaTek,in the capacity of head of market research, technology marketing, or corporatestrategy. Healsocompletedtwo expatriate assignments in Japan and France. Inaddition, he was a core team member of two technology startups, of which one wasacquired and the other is still in operation. Dr. Wang has been with TainanNationalUniversity of the Arts as a research fellow since September 2018. He also served asDean for Research and Development of the School fromFebruary 2019 to February 2020. His research interests includetechnology arts, marketing for innovations, andarts in marketing

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Ronald Weissman, Ph.D.

Dr. Ronald Weissman has been a member of the Band of Angels since 2007 and serves as Chairman of the Band’s Software SIG. Ron has more than thirty years of experience in technology management and investing. Ron joined global VC and private equity leader Apax Partners as a partner in 2000. At Apax, he focused on early-stage software, and participated in numerous US and cross-border deals. Since Apax’s transition out of venture capital, Ron has continued to consult for Apax and manages key companies in Apax's venture technology portfolio. Through Apax and his own angel activity Ron has invested in or advised more than 60 companies and has served on more than 25 early and mid- stage company Boards. Ron’s current investment focus is on business software and Health IT, with a special focus on analytics and text technologies. His current angel investments include Practice Fusion (electronic medical records), Navera (employee benefits education), Gainsight (customer revenue optimization), Sonim (ruggedized cell phones), Materna (obstetrics medical device) and Taulia (dynamic invoicing and payment management). He is currently a Director of Host Analytics (Chairman, corporate performance management), Transera (call center optimization), Wingtip (men’s club/furnishings) and Navera. Prior to Apax, he was Vice President of Strategy and Marketing for Verity, a leader in corporate information retrieval. During his tenure, Verity’s executive team earned the Large Company Turnaround of the Year award (1999) from the Turnaround Management Association; Verity gained dominant market share and saw its market capitalization grow from $50 million to more than $1.5 billion. Before joining Verity, Ron spent more than five years working with Steve Jobs at NeXT, where he managed European and Corporate Marketing. Prior to his work in Silicon Valley, he directed academic computing at Brown University and, prior to that, at the University of Maryland, where he was Associate Professor of History. As an historian, Ron is the author of numerous works about Florence during the Renaissance. A frequent conference speaker on angel and venture capital, Ron has published and lectured extensively on venture finance, entrepreneurship, corporate governance and software trends and was one of three industry leaders profiled in the 2003-2006 Price Waterhouse Coopers Technology Forecast. He was also recently profiled in the San Jose Business Journal (“Angel of the Apocalypse”) for his views on the angel economy. He has been an advisor to many organizations, including Apple, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, NeXT, Sun Microsystems. Unisys and several departments of the US Government. Ron has served on government advisory panels, including the future of electronic record keeping for the National Archives and Records Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration, and has recently served on a US State Department task force on the future of e-diplomacy. He has also been a regular guest lecturer on venture capital and angel finance at Berkeley, Stanford and Santa Clara University. Ron is also a partner at Performance Works and works with corporate clients to refine vertical market selection and market entry strategies. Ron is a Fulbright Scholar and member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received his BA, M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in History from the University of California at Berkeley. Ron serves on the advisory boards of market research firm BASEX, and the Venture Capital Task Force. From 2001 to 2013 he served as an Overseer of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and as Associate Trustee of Penn and has also served on the Corporate Council of the San Francisco Opera. He is currently on the board of San Francisco Classical Voice, the Bay Area’s leading classical music community website. His interests include music, European history, photography, politics and entrepreneurship. Ron blogs on venture capital and angel investing at www.perworks.com

Walter Wohlmuth

Walter Wohlmuth is a semiconductor foundry and integrated device manufacturer executive (Vanguard International Semiconductor, WIN Semiconductors, First Solar, Qorvo) who in his parallel, concurrent career has become an investor in a variety of deep tech startups. In his career, he has led teams and organizations developing core semiconductor technologies for digital, wireless, and solar industries. He led strategic planning, business development, and profit loss centers in the US and Taiwan. He also led the sale of Fujitsu corporate’s stake in the Aizuwakamatsu, Japan 6” semiconductor wafer fab to Singaporean investors. This was an appointment for the joint owners; Transphorm of Santa Barbara, CA and Fujitsu, Japan.

Walter has made a variety of personal Angel investments in the deep tech space over the years. His investment experience includes 3 successful exits and 1 failure to date including OneTree MicroDevices of Santa Rosa, CA whose main products were for cable television amplifiers and who was acquired by Analog Devices; Redlen Technologies of Victoria, Canada whose main products were for medical imaging and who was acquired by Canon Inc of Tokyo, Japan; and IconicRF of Belfast, UK whose main products were 5G and low-earth orbit satellite circuits and which was acquired by MicroChip Technologies, Chandler, AZ. Foveate of Haifa, Israel worked on image sensing for security systems but failed to survive. Current investments include GuerrillaRF based in Greensboro, NC and Anokiwave based in San Diego, CA both of which are working on 5G cellular products and systems; Pallidus based in Albany, NY working on novel Silicon Carbide substrate growth for electric vehicles; Maja Systems based in Milpitas, CA working on wireless communications for industrial and automotive; and SweGaN AB based in Linkoping, Sweden working on Gallium Nitride materials for wireless and power electronics industries and wherein Walter serves as a member on the board of directors.

Walter has a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL in electrical and computer engineering and masters plus undergraduate degrees in engineering physics from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He lives in Taipei, Taiwan and is the proud father of 1 young, ambitious man who is 19 years old attending the University of Washington in Seattle.

In his spare time, Walter enjoys hiking, bicycling, swimming, scuba diving, hockey, and travel.

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Donald (Ta-kuang) Yang

Donald Yang is an entrepreneur and semiconductor technology expert who enabled many major CPU/GPU and wireless communications products on advanced process technologies. His most recent achievements include the acquisition of a leading CPU maker to TSMC’s 40nm process and its design success on the cutting-edge High-K metal gate process. With no game console at home in 2007, Donald managed the Microsoft XBOX 360 GPU full chip implementation service and is credited for its design success on TSMC’s process platform. XBOX 360 turned out to be one of the most successful game consoles in Microsoft’s history. In 2005 and 2006, Donald designed TSMC 65nm and 90nm standard cell libraries that are now put into billions of chips worldwide today that function well in virtually every major category of consumer and industrial electronics products. Before joining TSMC, Donald founded TrustView, an EDA security software company in Taipei. From 2000 to 2005, he drove the TrustView business development from zero to No.1 market share in China and Taiwan with a very well recognized brand name. During this start-up period, Donald acquired many large enterprise customers such as Quanta Computer, Foxconn, HTC, AU Optronics and MediaTek. After driving the TrustView business to generate substantial revenue with strong market recognition, Donald sold this business to Systex, one of the largest software companies in Taiwan. Donald received B.S. degree from National Taiwan University and M.S. degrees from Stanford University and University of Southern California. He is a three time Big Sur Marathon finisher (2007-2009) and a 6K ocean swim finisher (2006) across Peng-Hu Bay.

David Yang, Ph.D. 

Serial Entrepreneur in AI

A Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur with a focus on AI. He is the founder of ABBYY, a world-leading developer of AI and Content Intelligence solutions, and the founder of Morfeus.ai, a project dedicated to creating artificial consciousness and emotional quadruped robots. A member of Band of Angels, founded 12 companies.

Dr. Yang is a respected expert and thought leader in the fields of AI, conversational chatbots, generative AI for music, art, and text, non-organic companions, artificial consciousness (AC), collaboration analytics, people analytics and content intelligence. 

He is the founder of ABBYY, a world-renowned developer of AI, content intelligence, and process intelligence. With 1000 employees in 14 offices across 11 countries, ABBYY serves over 50 million users and thousands of enterprises in 200 countries, including PwC, McDonald's, Xerox, Toyota, Yum! Restaurants, Deloitte, PepsiCo, Jujitsu, Volkswagen, and UCSF. Leading RPA vendors such as UiPath, BluePrism, and NICE also rely on ABBYY's AI technologies.

Presently, Dr. Yang is focused on Morfeus.ai, a project dedicated to developing emotional artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness (AC), non-organic companions and emotional quadruped robots. 

Following the sale of his Yva.ai technology to Visier, Inc., Dr. Yang now serves as a consultant for Visier, a global leader in people analytics. Visier's People Workplace Dynamics platform uses secure and ethical continuous listening and collaboration analytics to improve employee well-being and business performance. Dr. Yang also serves as an Advisory Board Member (Human Experience in the Workplace) at HR.com.

Throughout his career, Dr. Yang has been a pioneer in several industries. He created the Cybiko, the world's first handheld wireless communication computer for teenagers, in 1998-2002. He co-founded iiko (Syrve), an AI-powered restaurant and hospitality technology company, in 2004-2007, and co-founded Plazius, a customer loyalty and mobile payment platform. He has also founded a number of creative art-based ventures, such as FAQ-Café studio, DeFAQto.

Dr. Yang’s philanthropic, educational, and scientific activities include co-founding Ayb Educational Foundation and Ayb School, advisory board positions at FAST -  Foundation for Armenian Science and Technology and The Grains of Good Foundation (California, USA), which develops the best inclusive educational practices around the world, and INAU (In Autism), an inclusive Artificial Intelligence that speaks the language of people with mental special needs.

Dr. Yang is a TEDx and keynote speaker Will robots ever become part of the human family , 5 Leadership Styles to Success and holds numerous patents and scientific publications to his name. The World Economic Forum in Davos named him one of the top 100 World Technology Pioneers, Engagedly announced Dr. Yang as Top 100 HR Influencers of 2021, Best Startup US  named Dr. Yang as California’s 100 Top Founders in the Big Data Space.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-yang-ph-d-4bb4025/ 


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Pierluigi Zappacosta

Pierluigi Zappacosta co-founded Logitech in 1981 where he held various roles including President and CEO. From 2003 to 2012 he was CEO of Sierra Sciences, a biotechnology company whose long-term goal is to develop drugs and therapies that will reverse the effects of human aging. He is currently Chairman of Faro, a private equity fund based in Italy.

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Ron Zielinski

Ron Zielinski is a 30+ year Customer Service Leader in the Laser and Photonics Industry, where he has created customer and business success across diverse customer segments - from Nobel Prize researchers to world class consumer electronics manufacturers leveraging complex global supply chains. Over the past 17 years Ron has led Global Customer Service for a leading Photonics Industry company (mkt cap: $4.9B) overseeing service strategies, operational transformations, steep product and service revenue growth, several acquisition integrations, global CRM implementations and a worldwide team of >500 direct employees across 15 countries. Ron is a regular presenter on topics such as Service growth, leadership, strategy and operations at Service Conferences.  He routinely oversees customer satisfaction rates of >95%, annual service related revenues exceeding $350M, and first time resolution rates >90%. Ron has extensive experience in Asia, having successfully built industrial-level service infrastructure in China, Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan and having traveled to Asia regularly since 1987. Ron views business success through the eyes of customers and seeks to ensure its success is derived through strong focus on alignment of product to customer needs. Since 2014 Ron has volunteered for the Sunnyvale Sister City Organization where he nurtures his emerging Japanese language skills and oversees a novel Adult Exchange Program with the city of Iizuka, Japan.

John Zoglin

John Zoglin is a digital marketing and eCommerce executive who has recentlymerged hisvocation with hisavocation of healthcare by joining BlueShield of CA to lead Performance Marketing in their Senior Markets group.John’spassion for healthcare (reform) is reflected in hison-going role on theEl Camino Healthcare District Board (publicly elected) and El CaminoHealth ($1B) boards where he hasserved since 2007. As chair of ElCamino Health Hospital he led the board’s re-imagining of its governance philosophy which led to recruiting 24 community members,with deep subject matter expertise, to 6newly created oversightcommittees. This innovation in district hospital governance has deliveredon extremely high expectations for an improved quality of governance. Johnalso drove the initial adoption of anenterprise scorecard and iscurrentlyone of the lead board members working with the executive team andMcKinsey to transform the enterprise strategy.Professionally,Johnled teams at start-ups and smaller companies like Netli(drove Series B round, purchased by Akamai), intouch group,Postal Buddy, PGP (purchased by Symantec), Coremetrics (purchased byIBM) and Corel,as well as at large enterprises like Bay/Nortel Networks,Dell,and IBM. Healso was as a financial analyst at EF Hutton.John’s academic background includes BA, magna cum laude, ineconomics from Harvard and MBA from Stanford where he isa proud co-founder of the Challenge for Charity –entering its 31st year: whosemission is to encourage philanthropic involvement and school unitythrough a competition of 9West Coast business schools.


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Marco Zuniga

Marco Zuniga received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and his MS/PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly prior to graduation, he co-founded Volterra Semiconductor with four friends/colleagues from Berkeley. Volterra sought to develop high-performance analog and mixed-signal power management semiconductors for the computing, storage, networking and consumer markets. He held many roles at Volterra, most notably responsible for the semiconductor technology roadmap for the company. In this capacity, successful product execution led to >20X cost-performance improvement in all product lines, enabling cumulative revenue to >$1B by 2013. The company went through an IPO in 2004, with eventual acquisition by Maxim Integrated in 2013. He is currently at Maxim Integrated, developing technologies for the datacenter, automotive, industrial and mobile markets, and holds 60 patents. Also, an avid pianist and composer, he plays yearly in Saratoga, CA with a local symphony orchestra. He is also active in the academic community, advising and providing financial assistance to students in engineering and physics.