Boards

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.

Marie Ekeland, a partner at Elaia Partners, is currently a member of the board of directors for Allmyapps, Criteo, Scoop.it, Wyplay and Ykone.  She began her career in 1997 at the New York investment bank JP Morgan, where she participated in the development of a front-office worldwide application.  She then moved to Paris, and managed a team to run that global application.  In 2000, Marie joined the investment team at CPR Private Equity, then moved to the Venture Capital team as CPR was renamed Crédit Agricole Private Equity.  She then joined Elaia Partners in 2005.  Marie has an engineer degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Dauphine, Paris, and holds a master degree in Analysis and Economic Policy at the School of Economics in Paris.

Dana Evan was appointed to the board as Strategic Finance and Operations Executive. She brings a unique combination of strategic and executional strengths to more than 25 years of executive leadership experience in global finance and operations management.
Ms. Evan is a Certified Public Accountant and holds a B.S. in Commerce with a concentration in Accounting and Finance from Santa Clara University.
Ms. Evan served for 12 years as CFO of VeriSign, Inc., where she was a founding executive and a significant contributor to the company’s growth and profitability. She led VeriSign’s worldwide operations related to finance and accounting, real estate and property management, human resources, legal matters and investor relations, as the company grew from a small venture-backed start-up in 1995 to a global corporation of nearly 5,000 employees.
Former CFO and Executive Vice President, VeriSign, Inc. (VRSN)
Present and Past Board Member of : Box.com; Everyday Health; Fusion-io (FIO); MySQL; Omniture, Inc. (OMTR); Proofpoint, Inc (PFPT); Second Life (Linden Labs) ; Stella and Dot; Survey Monkey
Ms. Evan was a key member of the executive management team, helping to set business strategy and manage company operations as revenue reached nearly $2 billion dollars, driving profitability and cash flow of nearly a half billion dollars per year. During her tenure, Ms Evan led the company’s institutional financing rounds, including its successful IPO in 1998 and follow-on financing initiatives.

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.

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.

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. Through his 30-year career, he has led a digital agency, broadcast television network, magazine publisher and TV distribution business. Most recently, Warner built and led Razorfish (formerly Avenue A) in New York from 2000-2008. During this time the agency was named Digital Agency of the Year by AdWeek and recognized as a pioneer in digital marketing. He also served in a senior role at aQuantive, parent company to Razorfish, from its inception through its sale to Microsoft in 2007. Before Razorfish, Warner held leadership positions at Primedia and CBS.

Jeff Epstein is the former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Oracle Corporation, the world’s largest enterprise software company, and DoubleClick, the Internet advertising technology company now owned by Google. Currently, Epstein is an Executive in Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners, a Senior Advisor at Oak Hill Capital Partners, and a member of the board of directors at Priceline.com. Jeff received a Bachelor of Arts in Economic and Political Science from Yale University and a MBA from Stanford.

Usama Fayyad is Chairman & CTO of ChoozOn Corp – a personalized mobile search engine for offers. In 2010 he was appointed by King Abdullah II of Jordan to lead OASIS-500 as its Executive Chairman -- a tech startup investment fund, accelerator/incubator, entrepreneurship training program, and angel network that aims to fund 500 Internet and Technology startups. Up until September 2008, he was Yahoo!'s chief data officer & Executive VP where he applied Big Data techniques to content and advertising targeting and built the world’s largest group of data scientist – helping Yahoo! grow its revenues for targeting by 20x in 4 years. In 2003 Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining consulting and technology company that was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. In early 2000, he cofounded and led Audience Science (digiMine, Inc.) after five years spent leading the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and building data mining in Microsoft's server division. He held a leadership role at NASA's JPL (1989-1996), where his work in the analysis of Big Data in scientific applications garnered him the top research excellence award from Caltech/JPL and a U.S. Government medal from NASA.
Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan, he holds BSE's in electrical and computer engineering; MSE in CSE; and M.Sc. in mathematics. He has published over 100 technical articles and holds over 30 patents, is a Fellow of the AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and a Fellow of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), has edited two influential books on the data mining and launched and served as editor-in-chief of primary scientific journal in the field of data mining.

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.

Eric Hippeau is a partner at Lerer Ventures, a seed venture capital fund in New York City and currently is a Starwood Hotels and Resorts board member. Hippeau was the Chief Executive Officer of The Huffington Post until March 2011 when the company was sold to AOL. Prior to joining HuffPost, Hippeau was managing partner at Softbank Capital, a New York and Boston based venture capital fund specializing in early stage investments in technology and digital media. Hippeau joined Softbank Capital in 2000 from Ziff-Davis, Inc., where he was Chairman and CEO. Hippeau graduated from the Lycee Francais de Londres and attended Sorbonne University.

Dan Rosensweig serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Chegg, where he oversees the overall business operations and executive management. Dan brings successful, high-growth consumer business experience as he previously served as Chief Operating Office at Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo!, Dan also served as President of ZDNet where he managed the successful merger with CNET. Dan received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Hobart College in Geneva, New York.