Rick
Bentley, CEO and Chairman
Mr. Bentley has over 15 years of Silicon Valley startup
experience. He was founder and CEO of Televoke Inc. (now deCarta),
where he raised eight figures of Venture Capital from some of
Silicon Valley's most respected funds and established
partnerships with leading industry players, including billion
dollar companies.
Mr. Bentley was brought in by the investors to be Interim-CEO of
American Staffing, LLC. He was a Senior Consultant at Bearing
Point Inc., which included two assignments in Baghdad. At
General Magic he managed the "Portico" program, derivatives of
which serve over a million subscribers. He was Director of
Business Development for Machina, a design and engineering house
that developed consumer electronics products, some of which sold
as many as 10M units. He was also Director of Product
Development for Sensory Inc, which currently has the largest
installed base of speech recognition systems in the world. Mr.
Bentley is the author of multiple patents and patent filings,
and received his BA in Physics and MS in Engineering from UC
Berkeley.
Richard Raisig, CFO
Mr. Raisig was most recently CFO of Aurora Systems, Inc., a
fabless semiconductor company designing and manufacturing LCOS
chipsets for the projection display market. At Aurora, Mr.
Raisig partnered with the CEO in redirecting the company to a
new category of smaller display products targeting the growing
market for small projection displays. Prior to Aurora, Mr.
Raisig was CFO of Microvision, Inc. a publicly traded technology
company developing and commercializing proprietary display
technology for the pico-projector market. Mr. Raisig joined
Microvision as its first CFO when it was going public as an
early stage startup company. While there, Mr. Raisig
successfully built and developed the finance, legal and other
corporate administration functions for performance and
scalability to support a growth company. Mr. Raisig’s career
also includes work as an investment banker with Dean Witter
Reynolds and in accounting with Price Waterhouse. Mr. Raisig
received a BA in Economics from University of California at
Irvine and an MBA in Finance from the University of Southern
California.
Craig
Johnson, VP Business Development
Craig has over 20 years of experience in a variety of Sales,
Sales Management, Marketing, Operations, and General Management
positions with his last assignment being COO of a digital
signage startup. Prior to that he was a Honeywell General
Manager, running a 100+ person organization with $27m in
revenues, that consulted, sold, installed, and maintained HVAC
systems, Fire Alarm, and Security systems in large, commercial
buildings.
Craig also has extensive experience in the marketing and sales
of electronic components to OEM and Distributor channels, both
through direct salesforces and independent rep organizations. At
the customer enterprise level, Craig managed the sales and
service teams for process automation platforms that monitor and
control refineries, power generation plants, and manufacturing
sites. Craig earned his Bachelors Degree from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and his MBA in Marketing from DePaul
University in Chicago. He is Six Sigma certified and served as a
Reserve Officer in the Armed Forces.
Bill Klaus,
VP Sales
Bill comes to Connexed with over 20 years of Sales and Business
Development experience. Before joining Connexed, Bill held
leadership roles at ROAM LLC, Atomz, Packeteer and Apple
Computer.
As VP of Sales and Business Development at Packeteer, he
personally recorded the company's first sale and built a
worldwide sales organization bringing in over $30M . In
addition, he created the OEM business unit which further
expanded the reach of their products. As part of the management
team, he contributed to a successful IPO and established their
leadership in the bandwidth management segment. At Atomz he
established their OEM business practice and created their
Software Developers Association. During his tenure at Apple, he
built an evangelism group focused on the business market
segment, led their PC integration effort with third parties, and
was an initial member of the ExIS consulting group created by
Apple and KPMG. As Owner and President of ROAM LLC, he developed
and managed an international retail holding company. Bill is a
graduate of San Jose State University; he also attended the
executive MBA program at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In addition, he is an advisor to Pancreatica, as a worldwide
gathering point on the Internet for the latest news on
pancreatic cancer.
Steve
Bristow, CTO
Mr. Bristow is in charge of Connexed IP strategy. He brings
three decades of engineering experience to this task. Most
recently he was the VP of Hardware Engineering at Televoke Inc.
In this role he was responsible for implementing an
internet/cellular control channel linked monitoring and control
system. Before that he was the VP of R&D for Radica Innovations.
Projects there included video and audio monitoring and capture
systems. He was also a founder of Wright Technology, Director of
Engineering for TIE Communications, VP R&D for Octus, Director
of Engineering for Verifone [HP] and VP of Engineering at Atari,
Inc. He was responsible for the development of a telephone
linked video picturephone that was latter sold by Panasonic in
the USA and Japan. Mr. Bristow holds a BS in Electrical
Engineering from UC Berkeley and a MS in Electrical Engineering
from the University of Santa Clara. He has been recognized as an
engineering expert and testified in a number of federal courts.
He co-ordinated the patent prosecutions at Atari, Octus,
Verifone, Radica and Televoke. He is a named inventor in over 17
US patents. He is a member of the Society for Information
Display [SID] and the Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers. [SMPTE]
