Neal Dempsey, Managing Director, Bay Partners

Neal launched his venture capital career in 1989 at Bay. Through cycles of change, Neal's investment thesis has been to find entrepreneurs with domain expertise and the fine art of listening. At the end of the day, customers decide whether startups will succeed or not and without listening to customers, entrepreneurs are seldom successful. This thesis has served him well through investments in category creating companies like Brocade, Informatica and Shiva.

Neal balances the stresses of his workload by giving back to the community.  In addition to serving as Managing General Partner at Bay, he serves on the Board of EMQ Children and Family Services (a.k.a. Eastfield Ming Quong). Neal's leadership helped establish the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program at the University of Washington Business School.

Promod Haque, Managing Partner, Norwest Venture Partners

Promod has 17 years of experience in the venture capital industry and currently serves as managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners. He joined Norwest Venture Partners in 1990. He has been ranked as a top dealmaker on the annual Forbes Midas List for the past five years, and in 2004, Forbes named him as the #1 venture capitalist based on performance over the last decade.  In 2006, Promod was presented with a Global Leadership award from NASSCOM.

Promod focuses on investments in semiconductor and components, systems, software and services. He was an early investor and a board member of Cerent (acquired by Cisco), Siara Systems (acquired by Redback Networks), OnDisplay (acquired by Vignette), Winphoria Networks (acquired by Motorola) and Extreme Networks (Nasdaq: EXTR).

Other notable investments and previous board seats include Tivoli Systems (acquired by IBM), Forte Software (acquired by Sun Microsystems), Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape), Information Advantage (acquired by Sterling Software), Arbortext (acquired by PTC), Open-Silicon (acquired by Unicorn Investment Bank BSC), Resonext Communications (acquired by RF Micro Devices), Showcase (acquired by SPSS), Yipes (acquired by Flag Telecom Group) and ZettaCom (acquired by IDT).

Chet Kapoor, CEO, Sonoa Systems

As a leader and innovator in the high-tech industry, Chet has spent 20 years in leadership positions in innovative software and hardware companies including VP of Content Management and Search Products at IBM and VP and GM for the Integration Group of BEA Systems. In addition, he was CEO of Gluecode, an open source application server company that IBM acquired, Vice President at webMethods and held various positions at NeXT.

Robert Schwartz, Managing Partner, Third Point Ventures. President, RF Associates North, Inc

Robert Schwartz is Managing Partner of Third Point Ventures, the Sunnyvale, CA based Venture Capital arm of Third Point LLC which is a registered investment adviser based in New York, with approximately $5.5 billion of assets under management. In addition to serving on the Board of Directors at Sonoa Systems, he is currently a Board member of EnPhase Energy, LitePoint, Liga Systems, Sequoia Communications, Inapac Technology, and Technocom Wireless.

Since 1984, Mr. Schwartz has been the President and majority shareholder of RF Associates North, Inc., a leading technical manufacturer's representative firm in Northern California. Mr. Schwartz holds two undergraduate Engineering degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.          

Raj Singh, Co-Founder, Sonoa Systems

Raj Singh brings to Sonoa Systems a wealth of experience in founding and managing technology startups. His previous startups include StratumOne Communications, a chip maker for wide area networks (sold to Cisco); InterHDL Inc., an EDA tools maker for chip design (sold to Avant!); and Advancel Logic, a Java processor company (sold to Noise Cancellation Technologies). His bigger success was Fiberlane Communications that was later split into Cerent Systems, sold to Cisco, and Siara Systems, sold to Redback Networks. Raj was co-founder and president of Comstellar Technologies, an incubator for technology startups. Raj is the founder and a General Partner of Redwood Ventures, a technology investment venture firm.

Raj is a co-author of “Digital Design and Synthesis with Verilog HDL”, a popular textbook that used by several universities for teaching graduate level courses on chip design. Raj worked as a Scientific Officer at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, India.