Amy Errett

Maveron

Amy joined the Maveron team as a partner in 2008, expanding operations beyond the rain of the Pacific Northwest’s Seattle to the fog of San Francisco. She offers Maveron more than 25 years of business and operating expertise as a leading entrepreneur, senior executive and social-mission visionary. Her focal points are emerging Web enabled consumer trends, e-commerce social shopping, and online education. Amy currently serves on the Altius Education, Livemocha and KidZui boards of directors.

Amy’s multifaceted career has ranged from the online Web 2.0 media industry to the offline consumer marketplace, and has stretched as far as volunteer nonprofit leadership. Most recently, she was chief executive officer and an owner of Olivia, repositioning the travel company as a complete lifestyle company for gay women both online and offline while multiplying revenues from $5 million to $25 million in 2007. In 2006, she was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California. Prior to her work at Olivia in 2002, she founded and served as chair and chief executive officer of The Spectrem Group, a worldwide strategic consulting, information, and M&A advisory firm. Amy sold Spectrem to an IPG subsidiary, NFO Worldwide (NYSE:NFO) in 1996. After the sale, she joined the senior management team at E*Trade where she diversified the company’s business beyond brokerage and ran a $200 million business that encompassed the management of E*Trade’s growth areas, including their business-to-business stock option division, and launched a successful asset-based products and investment management services division. Among Amy's citations is the Israel Fellows Award, presented by the San Francisco–based Jewish Community Federation. A passionate humanitarian, Amy is the chair of the board of Glide Foundation, San Francisco’s largest nongovernmental, direct social services organization. Amy is also a member of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast chapter of YPO and serves on the board of Wharton West.

A New York native, Amy earned an MBA in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in liberal arts from the University of Connecticut. She is a fanatical UCONN Huskies fan where she was a student athlete. (This makes for fascinating partner meetings during basketball season since she is not a DUKE fan!) She and her partner live in San Francisco with their daughter.

Alex Finkelstein

Spark Capital

Alex Finkelstein is a General Partner at Spark Capital and joined the firm at its inception. He has led Spark’s investments in 5min, 8D World, Linkwell, and Altius Education. Alex focuses on working with and investing in highly passionate entrepreneurs who enjoy leaving stable jobs to build transformative companies.

Prior to joining Spark Capital, Alex was the creator and producer of a number of television shows and Internet properties that he sold to major networks, including FOX, E!, Discovery, ITV1 (U.K.) and Yahoo. Alex’s shows all had major product integration components and were sold in partnership with Fortune 500 brands.

Previously Alex was a Principal at Seed Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm that was formed in partnership with Softbank. Before joining Seed Capital Partners, Alex was an Associate at GrandBanks Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that was also formed in partnership with Softbank.

Alex also worked at Cambridge Associates, where he served as a Senior Venture Capital Research Associate and Senior Consulting Associate.

Alex Finkelstein holds a BA in political science from Middlebury College.

Paul Freedman

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Paul is an educational entrepreneur with a strong track record of founding, managing and investing in educational businesses. He was the conceptual creator of the Ivy Bridge College joint venture with Tiffin University in 2007.

Previously, Paul founded Academic Engine, a student recruitment technology company, which he sold to Hobsons Inc., a subsidiary of the Daily Mail and General Trust, in 2004. Afterward, he served as President of Hobsons EMT, a subsidiary of Hobsons focused on online student recruitment technologies, where he increased revenues and profits over tenfold and managed multiple acquisitions and company integrations, including Chat University and AY Recruiting Solutions.

Paul graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Public Policy with a concentration on Law and Economics.

Saar Gur

Charles River Ventures

Saar is passionate about discovering and growing early-stage companies and focuses on CRV’s consumer and internet investments. Saar currently sits on the boards of Progress Financial, Altius Education, Magnetic, Wonderhill, and Blippy (incubated at CRV), and was involved in CRV’s seed investment in social games company LilGreenPatch (acquired by Playdom) and Viki. Saar was also involved with CRV’s investments in Twitter and Scribd.

Prior to joining CRV, Saar was a co-founder of Brightroll, the world’s leading Internet video advertising network Saar was also the co-founder of Carebadges.com (acquired by Facebook Causes) and remains an active advisor to Causes. Previously, Saar was VP of Customer Acquisition, and responsible for the P&L of Adteractive, a leading performance-based marketing company with over $120m in revenues achieved with no outside capital. Most recently, Saar launched FounderDating, an endeavor aimed at helping talented entrepreneurs find co-founders and compelling business ideas.

Daniel Pianko

Noah Fund

Prior to founding Noah Fund in 2008, Daniel has spent ten years investing in, operating, or advising education and related businesses from universities to publishers. Most recently, Daniel led his former firm’s investment in a 1,200 student university and served as the lead analyst of an education focused hedge fund.

Daniel began his career as an investment banking analyst in the Financial Institutions Group at Goldman Sachs. He entered the education industry as Director of Strategy and Planning at LearnNow, which was sold to Edison Schools. At Edison, he played a leading role in the largest public/private partnership in American public schools when Edison received a five year, $500 million contract to operate 20 schools in Philadelphia.

Daniel graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University and received a M.B.A. and M.A. in Education from Stanford University, where he chaired Stanford's Business of Education Conference. Daniel currently sits on the board of Altius Ed Inc., Global College, LLC and is a founding member of Hayground Cove Student Partners LP.

Ronald Posner

Mr. Posner has been a leader in the consolidation of the high technology, internet and software industries for more than 30-years. He has a strong track record as CEO, investor and board member of improving market values and liquidity results for public and private companies in record time frames.

He started his career at The Coca-Cola Company and Xerox Data Systems in sales and marketing roles. He then led two successful liquidity events in the computer services business in the 70's at National Training Systems, which he founded and sold the Safeguard Scientifics (SFE), and Tratec, which was taken public and then sold to McGraw Hill.

He then led consolidation and turnarounds in the PC and enterprise software industries from the early 80’s to the mid-90’s as CEO of Peter Norton Computing, which he merged with Symantec (SYMC); as CEO of Wordstar, which he merged with The Learning Company to create over $3B in market value after 20 consumer software acquisitions; and at Ansa software (CEO role) and Ashton-Tate (Exec VP role), both of which were merged into Borland (BORL). He was an investor and board director of Cyber-Media, which was sold to McAfee (MFE), and SmallWorld in the UK, which was sold to General Electric. He was also an early investor in Segue Software (SEGU), just sold to Borland.

Mr. Posner then participated in the growth and consolidation of the internet industry, starting in the mid-90’s, as a start-up investor/board member in such companies as Match.com, sold to InterActive Corp (IACI); Spinner.com, sold to AOL; NetAngels/Firefly, sold to Microsoft; Rival Networks, sold to Terra-Lycos; Flipside.com, sold to Vivendi, and Click2learn that was merged with Docent to form Sum Total Systems (SUMT). He remains an active investor in www.iwin.com.

Since its formation in 1997, PS Capital, has made investments in and provided advisory services to the telecom/wireless/digital media industries. PS Capital also led the recapitalization of Novatel Wireless (NVTL), and made investments in Popular Telephony, a VOIP company, Iris Wireless, Brand Mobile, Instrumental Media, and d3d Media.

Recently Mr. Posner became a Venture Partner at Saints VC (www.saintsvc.com), focused on secondary venture transactions in Europe and Asia. He also serves on the advisory boards of IDG Ventures (San Francisco), Next Stage Ventures (Paris), Palace Ventures (London), and Minerva/Sabanci Ventures (Turkey). He was the first E.I.R. at Mayfield Fund in 1988.

Additionally, Mr. Posner serves on the boards of eChinaCash, Trinity Learning and Razorsight, and is an investor in several VC Funds, including NEA and JP Morgan Technology Partners.

He received his MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS Math degree from Rensselaer.