Entrepreneurs

Some of the bright entrepreneurs Tandem is now backing...

Sarah Eisner – Sarah loves building brands from the ground up and creating buzz. She spent the first ten years of her career utilizing her tech education in product marketing and marketing strategy at Cisco. After the birth of her two rambunctious sons, she left Cisco for a tech startup and then just a short year later, in 2006, left the tech startup to co-run an innovative baby bottle company, Adiri, with two other local moms. At Adiri she handled all manner of marketing strategy, branding and outreach (where she learned that she LOVES guerrilla Internet marketing) and also ran sales, PR, advertising, and customer service while weighing in on design, manufacturing, distribution and fulfillment.

Sarah has a M.S.I.E./E.M. in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford, and a BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. When not at her computer or snuggling with her boys, she can most often be found in the pool or on the soccer field.

Rod Frey – Rod is an engineer who loves building things - electronics, machines, buildings, and software. When he's not recreating the Industrial Revolution in his garage, Rod is at his computer pounding out code with one hand, flipping through a book on the Latest Best Ever Language with the other hand, and learning to play bass guitar with his feet.

After assessing the job market for philosophy grad students, Rod got a computer engineering degree from the University of Alberta. He was Director of Engineering for Jotter Technologies and then SAFLINK, a biometric authentication company. He moved on to become CTO for CareerID, an innovative online psychological testing service. Rod is now following his entrepreneurial bug into the cloud computing world to tackle a number of challenges around email management.

Melissa Lawrence – Melissa was Senior Counsel at Home Box Office where she worked on nearly every major programming acquisition and distribution deal that HBO entered into during her six year tenure (e.g., the sale of The Sopranos to A&E, the largest cable syndication deal of all time). She loved the work and developed an unparalleled intuition for how to maximize revenue from the distribution of video content. It also exposed her to the shifts in the distribution, consumption and monetization of video content, whetted her appetite for the dynamic, turbulent waters of Internet video and catapulted her into her current entrepreneurial journey.

Melissa was a fellow at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Philosophy, and is a graduate of Amherst College, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University. She speaks three languages and loves to throw parties, travel, read, and build legos with her husband and sons.

Vijay Mani – Vijay left the safe confines of Microsoft, where he developed document-sharing products, to stake his claim in the wild west of cloud computing. He believes that simpler is almost always better when it comes to software and internet services and applies this philosophy as much as possible in his development work.

Vijay earned his B.S. degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. He spends his "free time" climbing big rocks and generally enjoying the outdoors.

Dwayne Mercredi – Dwayne enjoys developing software with the goal of delivering the best experience possible to the end user. He was Chief Architect at SAFLINK, where he spent seven years building the development team and delivering several innovative biometric authentication products. Prior to SAFLINK, Dwayne was the chief architect and a principal developer at Jotter Technologies, where he augmented Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer by consolidating information from across the web into interactive headline feeds, providing a password vault, and using a credit card wallet for automated form-fill. Earlier in his career, Dwayne worked in a small consulting group, implementing a variety of web applications for large corporate IT departments.

Dwayne graduated from the University of Alberta in Computer Engineering. When not tap, tap, tapping away at his keyboard and pioneering new trails in the cloud computing space, he can be found helping his wife chase around the four younger Mercredis.

Andy Miller – Andy Miller has worked as a software engineer for over 20 years, primarily for Silicon Valley startups that include Masstor Systems, Cimage, Edify, Webvan, Routefree, and Business Signatures/Entrust. He played a key role in developing the core technologies of all these businesses, and is now thrilled to be driving development in his own company with a view to transforming the experience of travelers all around the world.

Andy lives with his wife in La Selva Beach, California. When not working to solve the next technical hurdle in his business, he can be found playing drums in a local Santa Cruz rock and roll band.

David Quail – David thrives on the challenge of creating software that not only meets, but exceeds user's expectations. After developing web applications at Imperial Oil, David spent 5 years at SAFLINK as QA lead. After SAFLINK, David consulted for various software development teams helping establish quality procedures that both increased the velocity and quality of development. He's now using his skills and experience to drive innovation in cloud computing.

When David isn't geeking out by writing scripts, breaking his colleagues' code, or playing with his newest electronic gadget, he can usually be found on an ultimate frisbee field. He spends his summers traveling to various tournaments and has competed at Canadian Nationals on three occasions.

Graham Rasmussen – Graham enjoys building online businesses through innovative approaches to online marketing and social media. He worked for four years at Intuit in product management, strategy, and marketing on QuickBooks and then online marketing for small and medium-size businesses. He's left the comfort of the "mother ship" to forge out on his own with a couple of like-minded entrepreneurs and transform how people use the Internet to travel.

Graham has a B.A. in Human Biology and M.S. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford. He likes traveling to "lesser-known" destinations and spends much of his weekends as a crewmember on a Bay Area sailboat racing team.

Philippa Smith – Before throwing caution to the wind and plunging into the world of entrepreneurship, Philippa worked in the entertainment industry for more than 13 years, including most recently at HBO, where she served as Vice President of Business Affairs for over five years. There, she was a key force in the launch of HBO's new international and domestic distribution businesses and she structured cutting edge deals for the distribution of HBO programming via the Internet, satellite, cable VOD and mobile. It was her role in developing various new sources of revenue for HBO's original content that fired up her interest in video distribution on new media platforms.

Philippa is the mother of three overly energetic young boys and thus plans to remain in the workplace for the foreseeable future! She has a BA and MA from Cambridge University and qualified as a barrister at the Inns of Court School of Law in London. Philippa grew up all over the world, and in addition to constructing marble runs in her living room, loves reality shows, cocktails with girlfriends and reading about the human brain (go figure!).

Sudheer Thakur – Sudheer has 15 years of engineering and management experience and has progressively become more and more entrepreneurial over his career. He started as a key developer for Oracle's object database and then moved to a number of startups like Sagent, Viquity and Business Signatures, where he architected and led implementations of their core technologies. Sudheer finally stopped working in other peoples' companies when he started his first business, BuyBundle, an online merchandizing solution that attracted hundreds of customers solely via word of mouth.

Sudheer grew up in Varanasi (India) and earned a B.S. in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and a M.S. in Computer Science from University of Utah. He's an avid world traveler (and salsa dancer) and has turned his entrepreneurial energies to helping transform others' travel experiences by using the Internet to bring people together.

Kevin West – Kevin has taken a keen interest in cloud computing and left Microsoft to build his own business in the space. At Microsoft, Kevin worked on various Windows components before deciding to move on. He now enjoys finding that right balance between online service and client technology to deliver the perfect user experience.

Kevin earned a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington. You'll find him at the gym or poker rooms when he's not writing code, testing product or wearing one of many other hats in his business.

David Zhao – David is interested in anything related to technology. Before Zecter, he led development of several projects at Amazon's Digital Media Group, including the AJAX reader for Search Inside the Book. David set out on the path of building his own company when he saw the transformational power that cloud computing could have in a number of areas including collaboration, media sharing, and data storage.

David graduated from University of Washington with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. He loves driving very, very fast.