Tech Wildcatter’s strength lies in its mentors; a group of highly successful men and women who have an entrepreneurial track record. Each mentor is selected because of their experience, willingness to give back, and drive to help your company succeed.
Jon Feld
Jon Feld is an accomplished entrepreneur, business builder, team leader, strategist, and consultant. He is recognized and respected by his colleagues and clients as excellent at assessing business dynamics, seeing opportunities, creating a vision for change and growth, and building and leading a team to collaborate and achieve exceptional results together. Read more
Carl Hefton
Carl Hefton has 35 years of business experience, most recently as a Founding Partner of Entrust Capital Advisors in 2008. Entrust provides M&A advisory and other investment banking services focusing on companies that have enterprise value of between $2 and $50 million. Read more
Todd Viegut
Mr. Viegut has a 20+ year track record bringing advanced technologies, products and services to market. He is a seasoned veteran with a demonstrated track record of positioning unique and innovative offerings into new and emerging markets for streamlined product growth, corporate growth and corporate level transactions. Read more
Larry Goldstein
Larry is an experienced early-stage investor and entrepreneur with a focus on software and communications businesses. He has been an active venture investor as well as angel investor in the southwest. Larry co-founded Seed Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital partnership where he has been involved in the formation and growth of a variety of technology based businesses over the past 15 years. Read more
Todd Price
In 2010, Todd Price is assuming U.S. leadership responsibility for establishing Hitachi Consulting’s new Environmental Sustainability Solutions Practice. In this role, Todd guides new the development of new client offerings, partnership strategy and acquisition strategy in the areas of Sustainability Research, Environmental Impact Reporting, Product Lifecycle Assessment and Facilities Energy Management. Read more
Ricky Kassanoff
Ricky is the CEO of Paragon Furniture – an educational and technology focused furniture design and manufacturing company based in Arlington, Texas. Since acquiring Paragon in 2004, Ricky has lead the company through every phase of strategy and tactics required to growing a small business. In addition to business planning and raising capital, he has lead the company transformation by bringing together a group of smart people and driving new ways to develop, design, produce and sell new and existing product lines in a profitable manner. Taking calculated risks and eagerly attacking opportunities Paragon has doubled in sales and at the same time has remained highly profitable. Read more
Mark Hubbard
Mark is the President of Paragon Furniture – a 27 year old educational and technology focused furniture design and manufacturing company based in Arlington, Texas. Since acquiring an equity stake in Paragon in 2004, Mark has lead the business through a significant restructuring of its distribution channels, as well as, rebranding and strengthening sales/marketing strategy and practices. As the Paragon partner chiefly responsible for sales activities, Mark is heavily involved in all aspects of the customer experience. Since 2004, Paragon sales have nearly doubled. Read more
Neal Rapoport
Neal is a seasoned entrepreneur. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1991, and moved to Dallas in 1993 and Plano in 2000. Neal started a popular deals & coupons site in 2004 and just sold it in 2008. Prior to that, he has been part owner in 2 consulting businesses, and worked for companies such as Microsoft & CompuCom. Currently Neal is in the process of looking at new business opportunities as either an angel investor or starting another business himself. Read more
John Boog-Scott
John has over 20 years of business experience working with companies doing custom or packaged software development. He started his career at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and left there to found Ensemble, a consulting firm focused on systems design development. He and his partners grew Ensemble from 2 to 70 employees and landed Ensemble on the Inc. 500 list. Read more
Gary Cohen
Gary Cohen is a semi-reformed attorney and serial entrepreneur focusing on innovative web-based businesses. In 2004, he co-founded Pegasus News, an award-winning online media company, and served as the company’s Vice President and Chief Operating Officer until it was sold in 2007 to Fisher Communications, a publicly-traded media company based in Seattle. Read more
Michael Martin
Michael has over 20 years experience in the information technology industry in diverse business development roles. He began his career at Unisys Corporation where he succeeded in sales to the manufacturing industry. Michael then worked in the systems integration and consulting field primarily with SHL Systemhouse (now a part of HP/EDS). Read more
Sam Fischer
Sam Fischer has been building and executing successful Partner and Alliance programs for over 20 years. He has held Senior Leadership roles with Sun, IBM, BMC and CA. With each company, he has leveraged his extensive network of contacts and established the Partner Ecosystem as a critical sales channel. Read more
Doug Jarvie
Doug Jarvie brings over 25 years experience and is especially seasoned managing in a high growth environment. He began his career in commercial banking and, later realizing he was more of an entrepreneur, acquired an interest in fledgling Streetball Partners, producer of the Hoop-It-Up basketball tournaments. Read more
John Rodakis
After a successful career investing institutionally, John Rodakis now primarily invests his own money and advises early stage companies through his investment vehicle GateBridge Investments. Read more
John J Reed
John Reed is a serial entrepreneur, investor and executive. Currently, he serves as Managing Partner of Azalea Ventures, a private equity fund dedicated to financing wind farms in the U.S. In 2001 he cofounded Blue Streak Network, which acquired the public assets of a new digital media technology company and has since raised $40MM in venture financing. The headquarters was moved to Montreal in 2006. Prior to Blue Streak, Reed founded Lifecast.com in 1999. After selling their “Gated Portal” to over 1000 country clubs, ClubCorp bought a controlling stake in 2000. Read more
Dana Brown
As Chief Outsiders' recently appointed new Principal, Brown complements Chief Outsiders' core values and the teams' exceptional skills. Brown specializes in corporate and market strategy, branding, product and company positioning, mergers and acquisitions, and business and channel development. Throughout her career, Brown has demonstrated the ability to define strategy and achieve profitable business results while managing organizational growth and change. Read more
Dave Copps
Dave is a serial entrepreneur that has founded and launched three successful companies focused on exploring the semantic web. He has been at the forefront of semantic search for the past 13 years following a pioneering effort in 1995 that resulted in the first real-time news service delivered via the web. Read more
Jeff Williams
Jeff Williams is a managing director of Covera Ventures and has more than 10 years experience investing in early and late stage companies. He also brings operational experience to Covera Ventures as a result of managing and ultimately divesting several companies in the commercial finance, property and casualty insurance and technology industries. Read more
Charlie Feld
Charlie Feld is one of America’s most recognized and successful Chief Information Officers (CIO) and information-technology consultants. As founder and CEO of The Feld Group—based in Dallas, Texas—Feld built a team of information technology executives that enabled dramatic results in Fortune 500 companies through the transformation of their own IT organizations. The Feld Group was acquired by EDS in 2004, which was subsequently purchased by Hewlett-Packard in 2008. Read more
Jim Janicki
Jim brings more than 25 years of executive leadership with extensive entrepreneurial and software technology experience. He is currently the CEO and President of Ignite Technologies, Inc. a provider of secure and scalable content delivery solutions for enterprises. Most recently, he served as President and CEO of Calpont, a privately-held company that focuses on database solutions. He also served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at Austin Ventures. Prior to that, he was the co-founder and CEO of MetaSolv Software (Nasdaq:MSLV), a leading global provider of operations support system solutions for communications service providers around the world. Read more
Mubina Gillani
Mubina has over 19 years of management experience in the finance and software solutions industries and 12 years of parallel experience in senior positions with non-profit organizations. She has focused the last 14 years on entrepreneurial and business transformation opportunities in the technology and education sectors and on M&A integration consulting in the oil and gas industry. Read more
Brad Taylor
In his twenty-five years in technology, Brad has worked for both established and start-up companies in line and executive management positions. Until 2008, Brad was an executive and original investor at Global Rail Systems, which was purchased in 2009 by Vossloh AG. Read more
Dennis Dayman
Dennis Dayman has more than 15 years of experience combating spam, security issues, and improving email delivery through industry policy, ISP relations and technical solutions. As Eloqua’s Chief Privacy Officer, Dayman leverages his experience and key relationships with the major receivers to provide best practices to Eloqua customers and ensure the deliverability and compliance of their communications and data flows. Read more
Andy Hickl
And Hickl is a Dallas-based entrepreneur specializing in semantic search technologies. He serves as CEO of Language Computer Corporation (LCC), a leading natural language processing company. Read more
Buddy Teaster
Combining general management, executive education, association and technology experience, Buddy is president and co-founder of RTM Networks where he and his partners are working to better connect universities and colleges with their alumni and membership organizations with their members to improve personal and professional development.
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David Matthews
David Matthews brings a wealth of relevant experience to Trailblazer Capital through his background as an entrepreneur, lead investor in emerging funds, venture capitalist, and venture philanthropist.
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David Rex
David Rex specializes in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and related financings, including as counsel to private equity and venture capital funds. He also specializes in assisting entrepreneurs and emerging growth companies from formation to exit, with an emphasis on venture capital and general corporate finance, strategic alliances and joint ventures, and related contract law. Read more
Gabriella Draney
Gabriella Draney is a serial entrepreneur and investor. Most recently she was an associate with HP Growth Partners, an early stage venture fund in Dallas. She co-founded an aircraft scheduling software company in 1998 that ended in a profitable exit. Read more
