Meet our Board of Directors
| Board of Directors | Board of Advisors |
| Byron Deeter |
Dan Ciporin |
| Toby Coppel | Ron Grant |
| Dominique Vidal | Jim Warner |
| Benoist Grossmann | |
| Marie Ekeland |
Byron Deeter
Byron Deeter is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners with vast experience as a successful entrepreneur, investor, and consultant. At Bessemer, Byron focuses on investments in the Cloud Computing and Internet sectors, holding board seats at Bizo, Eloqua, Cornerstone OnDemand, Intacct and Retail Solutions. Prior to BVP, Byron was an executive at IBM, as a result of its 2004 acquisition of Trigo Technologies, the product information management company that he co-founded. At Trigo, Byron served as President and CEO, then became VP of Business Development as the company grew to profitability, 150 employees, and a turnover of $40M+. Prior to Trigo, Byron worked in private equity with TA Associates and at McKinsey & Company. Byron holds a degree with honours from UC Berkeley in political economy where he was named a California Emerging Leader Scholar and an Alumni Scholar, and was a varsity member of Cal's national championship rugby team.
Toby Coppel
Toby is a partner at Virgin Green Fund (VGF), a private equity fund that invests growth capital in renewable energy and resource efficiency businesses. Prior to VGF, he spent eight years in senior executive roles at Yahoo!, including Managing Director of Yahoo! Europe & Canada (2007-2008), Chief Strategy Officer (2006-2007) and Senior Vice President Corporate Development (2001-2006). Prior to Yahoo!, Toby was a co-founder of Windsor Media, a media-focused investment company and also previously held finance and investment roles with Allen & Company and Goldman Sachs International. Toby is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a member of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute. Toby has a Master of Arts degree from Oxford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Dominique Vidal
Prior to joining the London office of Index Ventures as a Partner in September 2007, Dominique was the CEO of Yahoo! Europe from 2004 to 2007. He joined Yahoo! from Kelkoo, when Yahoo! acquired the company in March 2004. At Kelkoo, where he was Managing Director from 2000 to 2004, Dominique drove the company's transformation from a small team with no revenues to Europe's preferred shopping search engine with 400 employees and revenues of $100 million per year. Prior to Kelkoo, Dominque was a partner at Banexi Ventures in Paris, where he led investments in a number of companies including Kelkoo, Algety and In Fusio. He began his career at Schlumberger, where he worked for 10 years in product marketing and business development roles in the telecommunications and smart card industries in France, the United States and Asia. Dominique has an engineering degree from Supelec.
Benoist Grossmann
Benoist Grossman is currently on the boards of Meetic, Dalet, Stepmind and OneAccess. Benoist Grossman joined AGF Private Equity in 2002 as Managing Director. Before joining AGF Private Equity, Benoist worked for several venture capital funds for over 10 years. He was a partner at Viventures from 1998 to 2002 and worked as Investment Manager at La Financière de Brienne. He had previously spent over 10 years working in industry as a laser systems specialist at EDF, NASA and Thomson-CSF Optronique, for whom he invented five patents and authored 20 or so publications. Benoist Grossman has a doctorate in physics from the Université de Paris VI and an MBA from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris.
Marie Ekeland
Marie has been working in the Finance & IT industry since 1997: first on the operational side and then as a VC. She started her career at JP Morgan, working in New York on the development of a worldwide in-house front office system, and then, back in Paris, on the management of its high-level support. She moved to CPR Private Equity in 2000 and has been acting as a VC within the Crédit Agricole group since then, focusing more specifically on the IT sector. Marie holds an engineer's diploma in Mathematics & Computer Science from the University of Paris Dauphine and obtained a Master's degree in Economics from EHESS (Paris).
Dan Ciporin
Dan Ciporin joined Canaan Partners in 2007 specialiing in digital media and communications investments. Ciporin is the former Chairman and CEO of Shopping.com. As CEO of the company beginning in 1999, Ciporin oversaw the company's growth from zero to over $100 million in revenues in just 5 years, culminating in the company's initial public offering in October 2004. During his tenure Shopping.com became the leader and dominant player in the newly emerging sector of comparison shopping, and was the third largest ecommerce site on the web before it was acquired by eBay in August of 2005 for $620 million. Ciporin earned his AB degree at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from Princeton University in 1980 and his MBA degree at the Yale University School of Management.
Ron Grant
Ron Grant is a senior executive in media, internet, and telecommunications with a proven track record in creating value. Most recently, Ron was President and COO of AOL, a $3B division of Time Warner with 8,000 employees and 80+ premier internet brands. Prior to AOL Ron was Senior Vice President of Operations for Time Warner, AOL’s parent company. Before moving to Time Warner, Grant was Senior Vice President of Business Affairs and Development for AOL and managed a team responsible for business development, negotiating key alliances, and operational investments. He joined AOL in 1997. Prior to AOL, he was a partner in the communications and entertainment practice of Mercer Management Consulting. Ron holds an MBA in Finance and International Business from Columbia and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Dartmouth.
Jim Warner
Jim Warner brings a diverse and deep set of experiences as a leader in the media business to his work advising companies in digital marketing and media. From 2000 to 2008, Warner was Executive Vice President of Avenue A|Razorfish, where he built and led the New York organisation and served on the Executive Committee of aQuantive, its parent company. While there he advised corporate clients such as Capital One, Verizon and Starwood Hotels on digital strategy, marketing and media. Before joining Avenue A, he held leadership positions at Primedia, CBS and HBO. Warner received a BA with honours from Yale College and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
