Board of Directors
Ray Kao
Ray has over 20 years of experience in information technology industry, including 10 years of CEO & CTO responsibilities, and 10 years of senior engineering management and product design and development. Ray is also a seasoned entrepreneur with a good track record of developing innovative technologies into business. Before founding CipherMax, Ray was the Chairman and founding CEO of Polaris Networks, which provides new generation multiservice optical transport and switching solutions. Before founding Polaris Networks, Ray was the founder, CTO and VP of R&D of TransMedia Communications which delivered the industry's first carrier-class Voice over IP media gateway solution. The company was acquired by Cisco in September 1999. Before founding TransMedia, Ray was the chief architect at Stratacom/Cisco for several generations of multiservice switching products. Prior to Cisco, Ray was a key designer on various networking products at Digital Equipment Corporation.
Ray has received several awards and patents in the areas of high-performance multiservice and multimedia system design. He has presented and served as a panel expert at numerous networking, storage, & security conferences and is also a board member and technical consultant for several leading high-tech companies. In 2002, Ray received Red Herring’s Top 10 Innovators award.
Ray holds an MSEE degree from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a BSEE degree from National Chiao Tung University. He also conducted advanced research at MIT.
Eric Copeland
Prior to joining Venrock in 1998, Eric developed communications equipment at Hewlett–Packard, E*ON, Orbital Sciences Corporation, and ALOHA Networks. At Venrock, Eric focuses on communications infrastructure and service opportunities. He currently serves on the boards at 2Wire, General Bandwidth, SteelEye Technology, Cadant, Kendin Communications, TalkingNets and CoWave Networks. Eric graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. He received an M.B.A. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Jim Jones
Jim Jones is a Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners and his investment focus is in semiconductor and MEMS components as well as enterprise systems. Jim joined Scale Venture Partners in 2000 and currently sits on the boards of Auvitek, Entone, Enuclia, MaXXan, NComputing, and Xceive. Jim was also responsible for Scale Venture Partners' investment in Monolithic Power Systems (NASDAQ: MPWR).
Prior to Scale Venture Partners, Jim led product management, product marketing, and business development groups at 3Com Corporation, where he managed a diverse $1.2 billion product line. He also spearheaded the company's entry into and market leadership of Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet solutions as well as its foray into the home networking market. Prior to 3Com, Jim worked in integrated circuit development and marketing with National Semiconductor, focusing on analog, ATM, FDDI, and Ethernet controller and transceiver solutions.
Jim holds a BSEE from the University of California, Davis.
David Liddle, PhD
David joined U.S. Venture Partners as General Partner in January 2000 after retiring as president and CEO of Interval Research Corporation, a Silicon Valley–based laboratory and incubator for new businesses. David co–founded Interval Research with Microsoft co–founder Paul Allen in 1992.
David founded Metaphor Computer Systems in 1982. He served as its president and CEO until 1991 when the company was acquired by IBM. At that time David was named Vice President of New Systems Business Development for IBM’s Personal Systems. In prior years, David also held both R&D and management positions at Xerox Corporation.
David has served on the board of directors at Sybase, Broderbund Software, Borland International, Starwave Corp. and Ticketmaster Group, and numerous private companies. David earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan and a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toledo. He has been named a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art and also is a consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford University