Charlie Giancarlo
Ceo, pure storage
Charlie Giancarlo has served as CEO of Pure Storage since August 2017. He has a threedecade track record of driving growth and innovation at leading global technology companies. Before joining Pure, Charlie served as Managing Director, Head of Value Creation and later Senior Advisor at Silver Lake Partners from 2007 to 2015, where he focused on business improvement and investment opportunities across strategic and operational initiatives for Silver Lake’s portfolio companies.
Prior to Silver Lake, for over a decade Charlie served in senior executive roles at Cisco Systems, including Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer. At Cisco, Charlie led Cisco’s multi-product growth, and was at the forefront of the Company’s R&D efforts for all product lines, with entry into new markets, including IP Telephony, WiFi, VPNs, TelePresence, and the SMB market.
Charlie received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Brown University, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.
Earl (Eb) Bright
President, ExploraMed
As President, Mr. Bright has many years of technology development, company formation and financing experience. He is an inventor, a founder of two companies, and has served on the executive management teams of five medical device start-up companies (Acclarent, NeoTract, Vibrynt, Moximed, and Willow), and one consumer electronic company (Nuelle). He was also the Director of Intellectual Property West Coast Operations at Guidant Corporation where he directed a nine member team involved in the litigation and strategic development of over 1300 patent and trademark applications.
Mr. Bright's experience spans the years as a business adviser and patent attorney. He began his career as a design engineer for the F-16, F-22 and the A-12 aircraft.
Eb is an inventor on ten U.S. issued patents with others currently pending. He holds MBAs from Columbia University and UC Berkeley, and a Juris Doctorate and BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma.
Jeff Grainger
Partner, The Foundry
Jeff J. Grainger is an intellectual property attorney and currently serves as a Managing Partner at The Foundry, a medical device incubator based in Menlo Park, California that has started numerous medical device companies over the past decade.
Previously, Mr. Grainger served as Vice President of Corporate Affairs and General Counsel of Xtent, Inc., a developer of drug-eluting stent systems which completed an initial public offering in 2007 (NASDAQ: XTNT). He also is the founder of First to File, Inc., a developer of software and services for automating patent process workflow. Mr. Grainger served there as Chief Strategy Officer and a member of the Board of Directors until the company was acquired by Mark Monitor, Inc. in 2002. Mr. Grainger has also served as Chief Patent Counsel of Heartport, Inc., a developer of devices for minimally-invasive heart surgery which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson and was an attorney specializing in patent prosecution at the law firm of Townsend & Townsend & Crew.
Prior to graduation from law school, Mr. Grainger served as a copyright licensing specialist at the British Broadcasting Corporation in London, and worked as a robotics engineer at Boeing Electronics Company.
Mr. Grainger is an inventor on more than 30 issued or pending U.S. patents as well as numerous foreign patent applications. Mr. Grainger holds a Juris Doctor degree with Honors from the University of Washington School of Law and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
Angela Macfarlane
President & CEO, ForSight Labs
As a Managing Member of ForSight Labs, Angela Macfarlane brings broad experience in early stage company formation with the goal of creating a community where innovation, creative solutions, and “the doing” are combined to build value and create companies focused on improving the lives of visually impaired patients. Over the past ten years, ForSight has started six VISION companies, which have collectively raised more than $150 million – including Transcend Medical, Inc.; acquired by Alcon, ForSight Newco II, Inc.; acquired by QLT and ForSight VISION5, Inc.; acquired by Allergan. Ms. Macfarlane currently serves as President and CEO of ForSight VISION4, Inc., a company revolutionizing how drugs are delivered to the back of the eye, in collaboration with Genentech/Roche.
Prior to joining the ForSight Labs team full-time, Ms. Macfarlane served as Chief Technology Counsel to The Foundry, a Medtech incubator. Ms. Macfarlane’s previous experience also includes serving as Technology Counsel for Thomas J. Fogarty, M.D., a renowned physician/entrepreneur, where she participated in all aspects of early stage technology review, licensing, intellectual property management and company creation. She has served as part of the senior management team and in-house counsel at several medical device start-up companies, including TransVascular, Inc. (acquired by Medtronic), AneuRx, Inc. (acquired by Medtronic), and VidaMed Inc. (through IPO).
Ms. Macfarlane is an inventor on 25 U.S. issued patents with others currently pending. She received her BA in Business Administration from San Francisco State University, and her J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law.
Roger Sippl
Founder, Executive Chairman and CTO Connected Cloud
Roger Sippl is a Silicon Valley software pioneer, entrepreneur and innovator. His 30 years of contributions have helped shape the enterprise software technology landscape of today. In 1980 he founded Informix Software, taking it public in 1986. Under his leadership, Informix pioneered SQL relational databases, report generators, screen data entry packages, 4GL application development tools, and scalable OLTP database technology. It is now a part of IBM, after surpassing a $4B market cap as a public company.
Roger was also co-founder and Chairman of the Vantive Corporation. Vantive became a leader in CRM and, as a public company, achieved a $1B market cap, and is now a part of PeopleSoft/Oracle. In 1993, he founded Visigenic Software, helping pioneer distributed object computing and the concept of the application server (based on CORBA, prior to the J2EE standard) in enterprises. Visigenic was acquired by Borland, after becoming a public company. After the Visigenic IPO Roger earned the “Golden Hat Trick Award” from Cristina Morgan at JP Morgan/Hambrecht and Quist for three Silicon Valley IPOs.
In the mid-nineties, Roger became a founding partner of Sippl Macdonald Ventures. He invested in several successful software companies, including Illustra (acquired by Informix), Broadvision (IPO), SupportSoft (IPO) and Red Pepper (acquired by PeopleSoft). In 2002, Roger founded Above All Software, a composite application platform that used web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Roger currently serves on the boards of WaveMaker (private), Elastic Intelligence (private), Filtini (private) and Interwoven (public IWOV), SolarWinds (SWI), as well as Fountain Valley School of Colorado Springs.
Bernie Shay
General Counsel, EarLens
Bernard Shay joined EarLens as General Council in June 2015. Bernie is a veteran medical technology expert with over 25 years of experience with M&A, litigation, licensing, intellectual property, compliance, business development and engineering at a range of leading companies, including Miramar Labs, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric and IBM. Mr. Shay holds a BSEE and MSEE from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and a JD, cum laude from Pace University.
EarLens Corporation is a privately held medical device company committed to providing hearing impaired patients a hearing solution that is designed to change the current standard of care for sound performance.
The company has developed the breakthrough EarLens Contact Hearing Device™, the world’s first hearing device to use light to transmit sound. The EarLens Contact Hearing Device is designed to transform the user’s own eardrum into a speaker, which enables delivery of an ultra-wide frequency range (from 125 to 10,000 Hz) and a higher maximum gain margin. The EarLens System is currently for investigational use only and is not marketed for sale. The company intends to seek FDA 510(k) clearance for the treatment of hearing impairment. EarLens Corporation is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.
BOB TAYLOR
FOUNDER, RPT LEGAL STRATEGIES
Bob Taylor is the founder and owner of RPT Legal Strategies PC in San Francisco and Palo Alto, providing legal and business advice to companies and investors with respect to all aspects of intellectual property and related fields of endeavor. He serves as a Venture Advisor to New Enterprise Associates and as a patent law expert for the National Venture Capital Association.
For more than 30 years, Bob focused primarily on patent litigation, serving as lead trial counsel and/or appellate counsel in dozens of patent, copyright, trade secret and antitrust cases involving a wide range of technologies and industries. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and a Lifetime Member of the American Law Institute.
Bob holds a J.D degree from Georgetown University Law Center and was a member of the editorial board of the Georgetown Law Journal during law school. He holds a B.S.E.E degree from the University of Arizona and was elected to Tau Beta Pi. He served in the U.S. Army and worked as an engineer for Motorola and for Bell & Howell before attending law school.
For many years, Bob has written and lectured on the business and legal problems associated with both intellectual property protection and the laws related to competition. For many years, he was the co-chair of Antitrust Committee of Intellectual Property Owners Association and until recently served as a Member of IPO’s Amicus Committee. Bob also served as a member of the 1992 Commission on Patent Law Reform. He is a former chair of the Antitrust Section of American Bar Association.