Spike Ventures Team

Bio: Dr. Middleton is internationally recognized as a serial innovator and as thought-leader in clinical informatics and healthcare information tech. He is Chief Informatics and Innovation Officer at Apervita, which delivers a PaaS for the democratization of healthcare data and analytics. Earlier, he was a professor of Biomedical Informatics and of Medicine at Stanford, Harvard, and Vanderbilt. He has also held executive leadership roles at Stanford, MedicaLogic/Medscape, Partners Healthcare System, and Vanderbilt. He studied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Colorado, received a Master’s in Public Health from the Yale University School of Public Health, and an MD from SUNY Buffalo.

Bio: Jen is an adviser, consultant, and board member with expertise in digital strategy, cybersecurity, data and analytics, and social media. She is CEO of JEM Consulting & Advisory Services and managing director of Consultants Collective. Earlier, she was VP of Digital & Social Media at Thomson Reuters and held management roles at Redwood Collaborative Media, Ziff Davis, and Ketchum. She served on the Social Media Advisory Council of the UN’s Population Fund and co-founded the nonprofit think tank Society for New Communications Research. Jen received her Master’s degree from Stanford and her Bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College.

Bio: Eric is a Managing Director at Montage Capital, a leading provider of growth debt to capital-efficient companies. At Montage, he co-manages investment funds and oversees investor relations, operations, and finance. Earlier, Eric was a venture investor at DCM, where two of his early stage investments became billion dollar IPOs. He also founded and ran his own startup company, managed products at Cisco and HP, and served in investment banking at a Boston-based boutique. Eric received an AB in Economics from Harvard (magna cum laude) and an MBA from Stanford.

Bio: Tamara is the President of Amaratal, a consulting company that offers strategic marketing and business consulting services to clients ranging from technology startups to established companies. She has over 25 years of experience in new technologies and markets in the US, Europe, and Latin/South America. Her areas of expertise include digital advertising, mobile, big data, digital media and entertainment portals, mobile gaming, social networking and consumer applications, e-commerce platforms, enterprise and embedded operating system software. Tamara has a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Bio: Christina is the President and Managing Director of Zacamy & Co., which provides strategic and financial advice to both public and private companies, including advice on corporate strategy, M&A, capital raising alternatives, and strategic partnerships. Previously, she worked in the Principal Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs and in the Mergers and Acquisitions and Corporate Advisory Group at Deutsche Bank Securities. She is a member of the Board of Directors of The LPGA Foundation, Chair of The LPGA Foundation Leadership Committee, and a member of the Finance Committee. Christina has a degree from Stanford University.

Bio: Cliff has 40+ years of experience in investment banking and investment management. He was a product specialist and client portfolio manager for an asset management firm for municipal and taxable strategies before joining Brandes Investment Partners, an employee-owned investment manager. There he worked as a Director and Co-Head of Fixed Income. Clients included corporate cash portfolios and pension plans, endowments, foundations, and pension consulting firms. He was president of the Stanford Club of NYC and is a member of the Stanford Associates. Cliff has a BA in Economics from Stanford and MBA from Harvard Business School.

Bio: Bruce is an angel investor, tech mentor, and startup advisor who lives at the intersection of innovative hardware products and business. He was a Co-founder/CTO of Immersion, leading development of haptic simulation and 3D shape-scanning products and technologies. He was also one of two Engineering Fellows (VP) and a main system architect at Intuitive Surgical, creators of the daVinci Surgical Robot. After Intuitive, Bruce was a senior member of the Robotics Initiative at X Inc. (fka Google[x]). He has 147 issued US patents and 200+ international patents and patents-pending. Bruce has a BS & MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and a D. Eng. degree from Stanford.

Bio: Theresia is an engineer, experienced entrepreneur, and investor in the new mobility space, focused on security, data analytics, and consumer sectors. She recently co-founded Aspect Ventures, leading early investments in Cato Networks, Exabeam, ForeScout, The Muse, SelfScore, and BirchBoxr. Previously, she was a Partner at Accel, championing many companies through IPOs or acquisitions, and a founding VP of Business Development & Sales at Release Software. Earlier, she worked at Bain & Company. Theresia has been named to Forbes’ Midas List six times, most recently in 2017. She holds a ScB in Engineering from Brown University and an MBA from Stanford.

Bio: Brian has been providing financing to high-tech firms in Silicon Valley and Southern California since 1982. He co-founded AVI Capital, a VC partnership with resources of $75M focusing on early stage IT investments, and co-founded Alpha Partners. He has also worked at Hewlett Packard and the Stanford Research Institute. Brian has served on many boards, including Digimarc, Apptitude, Intraspect Software, Pointbase, InViso, and Prosetta. He is also a past Board Member of the National Association of Small Business Investment Companies and the Monterey Bay Stanford Alumni Club. Brian holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford.

Bio: Mark is a partner at Five Peaks Capital Management, a PE firm focused on investments in tech-enabled services companies. He has over sixteen years of experience in private equity, with senior roles at DLJ Merchant Banking Partners (~$10B of capital under management) and JLL Partners (~$4B of capital under management). He has led PE and distressed debt investments across a range of sectors. Prior to that, Mark was an investment banker for Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette Securities, executing debt and equity financing and M&A advisory transactions. Mark holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA with distinction from Tuck at Dartmouth.

Bio: Avin is Director of Strategic Operational Finance at Wayfair, building the finance infrastructure for their supply chain & operations. Previously, he served as VP Finance for healthcare tech startup par8o. Earlier, Avin spent a decade at VC and PE firms, including Goldman Sachs. Avin began his investing career at Summit Partners, with later stints at Google, Great Point Partners, and OpenView. He has also been an angel investor and adviser to seed stage tech companies, including Rentjuice (sold to Zillow), Kahuna, vSplash, and more. Avin earned a BS and MS in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Bio: Julian is General Counsel of NIO USA, Inc., which is developing advanced technology modules for next-generation smart autonomous electric vehicles. Previously he was chief legal officer or general counsel for a number of SaaS companies, including Jasper, an IoT platform that was acquired by Cisco, Responsys, a SaaS marketing platform which went public and then was acquired by Oracle, and SuccessFactors, a SaaS talent management platform which went public and then was acquired by SAP. He started his in-house legal career at Salesforce, where he helped take it public. Before going in-house, Julian worked in the Palo Alto office of Skadden, Arps, served as a deputy district attorney for Santa Clara County, and completed a federal district court clerkship in the District of Hawaii. Julian is also an angel investor and board member of Vetter Software, Inc., a SaaS veterinary management platform. He earned a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and received his law degree from Berkeley Law.

Bio: Temi Marcella Awogboro is a Director with the Abraaj Group and Co-Founder of Kairos Angels, an early stage investment club which partners with visionary entrepreneurs to build scalable enterprises developing innovative solutions that address critical needs in their respective markets. Temi has more than a decade of experience in finance across developed and growth markets. As an investment professional, Temi has committed nearly US$500 million in private capital across a range of sectors including healthcare, consumer, industrials and financial services, in a bid to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Temi started her career at Goldman Sachs International, where she was a recipient of the Goldman Sachs and Institute of International Education’s Global Leaders Award. Temi holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and Master of Arts (MA) degree with First Class Honors in Economics from Christ’s College, the University of Cambridge, where she was a matriculation scholar. Temi is a Kauffman Venture Capital Fellow, an African Leadership Institute Tutu Fellow, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper (Lagos Hub) and Alumni Ambassador (London Hub). She is the recipient of the Future Awards Africa Prize for Professional Service, M&A Advisor’s European Emerging Leaders Award and has been recognized as the Female Lead’s Top 20 Women under 20; and, Management Today and The Telegraph’s 35 Women Under 35 in the UK.

Bio: Vikas Taneja is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG. He is on the Executive leadership team of BCG’s Technology, Media, and Telecom practice; a global leader of BCG’s GrowthTech business; and an investment committee and advisory board member of B Capital Group (Series B/C venture fund). Vikas is also an active angel with investments in companies such as Ripple, Refinery29, Citus Data (sold to Microsoft), Rapportive (sold to LinkedIn), Careport (sold to Allscripts), PubNub, Jugnoo, ChaiPoint, NowFloats, ClimateAI, and Evolve Energy. He holds a BS in computer systems engineering and economic development from Stanford University and an MBA from The University of Chicago – Booth School of Business.

Bio: Roby was member of the small IDEO/ Stanford group that defined Design Thinking, is the founder of IDEO Germany, ran development at Nanosolar with $500m in venture funding, and has 70+ patents in his name applied for or granted. He is partner at the innovation and strategy consultancy VCI, commuting between Berlin and Johannesburg, has built technology roadmaps on all continents for companies with a total market cap of $400bn, advises companies and countries on cultural transformation and worked for over 100 clients on anything from gold to jets to cars to chocolate bars. Roby has built the world’s largest mining innovation consortium with 150 partner companies, is a member of the digital advisory board at a 100k employee company, and taught at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, TU Munich and others. Roby is an angel investor in startups in Germany, the UK and US, Canada and South Africa, and advises corporate VCs and private equity funds.

Bio: I have spent most of my adult life trying to engender collaboration to solve problems that are almost always too complicated for an individual to tackle. Either because they require innovation beyond the current state-of-the-art or require expertise from multiple areas. I thrive on getting to the root-level understanding of the opportunity/challenge; recruiting individuals that have open minds (and ears :-)) and can come up with ideas worth pursuing; and then get out of their way as much as possible so that there is space for magic to happen. My professional experience has led to products and services that range from silicon design, board-level electronics, industrial designs including mechanical engineering of robots, and software ranging from firmware to always-on RESTful services to web and mobile applications. I have a B.S in Computer Science from Portland State University, and an M.S from Stanford University with an emphasis on Systems.

Bio: David is a retailing industry expert, with 40 years of experience as a corporate executive, industry analyst, and investor. As an equity analyst and portfolio manager at TIAA Investments, he had investment authority over portfolios averaging $1+ billion, including a global consumer fund. He was atop-ranked sell side analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein and Co. At Federated Department Stores, he led corporate development, mergers and acquisitions. David graduated with Distinction from Stanford University. He is a member of the Investment Committee of Phi Beta Kappa. He and his wife Elin founded the You’ve Got a Friend Fund of Healthy Acadia.

Bio: Dan Turchin is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Astound (www.astound.ai), the leading AI platform for employee service automation. He is a board member at Auger.ai and member of the Forbes Technology Council. Prior to Astound, Dan was Vice President of Product at DevOps leader BigPanda, Chief Product Officer at security analytics company AccelOps (now Fortinet), and a Senior Director of Product Strategy at ServiceNow. He also served as a founding board member at Rhomobile prior to its acquisition by Motorola. In 2000, Dan co-founded Aeroprise and served as CEO until it was acquired in 2010 by BMC Software. He is an active angel investor and startup advisor. Dan’s passionate about building great teams that build great products that solve hard problems that change lives. He’s a big fan of Orwell, Dr. Seuss, youth soccer, adventure sports, and Tynker. Dan has BS and BA degrees from Stanford University. Follow him on Twitter: @dturchin.