Investors
Bobby Yazdani
Bobby Yazdani is the founder and CEO of Saba. He founded Saba in 1997. Today, Saba, with over $100M in revenue is headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif., is the premier global provider of strategic human capital management. Saba's people platform are used by more than 17 million people worldwide. Prior to founding Saba, Bobby held various senior R&D management positions at Oracle Corporation. He has successfully mentored entrepreneurs and invested in many early stage start-ups including Aardvark, Clearspring, Dropbox, Google, Klout, Masimo, Medialets, NextBio, Salesforce.com, and Webs.com. Bobby has a BA in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.
Farzad Naimi
(RONAholdings LLC)
Mr. Farzad Naimi is the co-founder and managing partner at RONAholdings, LLC overseeing and leading its operations. A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Naimi brings over twenty-five years of successful Silicon Valley startup leadership, including 4 IPO exits. Mr. Naimi began his high–tech career at Centex Telemanagement as the head of technology and led Centex, a startup at the time, to its IPO in 1987. He continued his career as EVP and COO at Prestige International, Japan's largest Customer Relationship Management organization, witnessing its successful IPO in Japan. Following his career at Prestige, Mr. Naimi co–founded Genesys Labs, a leader in delivering real-time customer interaction software solutions. Genesys went public in 1997 and was subsequently acquired by Alcatel for $1.6 billion in January 2000. Mr. Naimi also participated in a start up, VisaNet do Brazil. Since then, VisaNet do Brazil has become the largest e–commerce and retail banking group in Latin America and had a successful IPO in June 2009, the largest IPO in the world that year, raising nearly $4.3 billion. Mr. Naimi has been the co–founder and chairman of several other companies including IQLabs, Sentek and LiteScape Technologies. More on Mr. Naimi's background can be found here.
Sanjog Gad
Senior Vice President Advanced Technology, Office of the CTO at SAP Labs, LLC
Reporting to the CTO of SAP Labs (based in Palo Alto, CA) he leads an Advanced Technology team and responsible for thinking out of the box and maintaining competitive edge in innovation, identify opportunities in new technology / new solution space, identify young companies to partner / acquire, technology advisor to executives (CEO & CTO) on changing technology landscape, working with Corporate Strategy and Portfolio management group to define portfolio strategy. Sanjog is often pulled into strategic projects within Company or with partners to provide technology guidance and oversight. He is responsible for defining and driving SAP's Cloud & Virtualization Strategy. He is a well respected subject matter expert in Enterprise Data Management, Cloud computing and Virtualization. He speaks frequently in various technology and business conferences representing SAP. He is also a designated SAP Venture fellow identifying startup companies to invest, partner and possible acquisitions.
Currently he is leading SAP's first cloud native platform development and all apps developed on this platform. His responsibility also includes operations and service delivery of this platform and apps on cloud. Sanjog has more than twenty five years of very diverse management & technology experience in Databases & Transaction Management, Enterprise Software, Collaboration and Search Engine Optimization, having held various senior executive position at leading technology companies including Baan, Microsoft, WebEx & Efficient Frontier. Sanjog was a founding team member of WebEx and led their Engineering and Professional Services efforts. He was instrumental in positioning WebEx as a collaboration platform company creating a unique WebEx-enabled Application program (WEA). He was instrumental in building WebEx Telco business from ground up. Sanjog spent more than 14 years at Baan and was founding team member of Baan core engineering team in Netherlands. He played various roles both from management and technology perspective around the globe. As a chief Architect, he was responsible for Baan's overall technology vision and strategy.
Safa Rashtchy
Safa Rashtchy is currently an angel investor and advisor, and sits on the boards of several start-ups. Safa was most recently a Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst focused on Internet media and marketing, and the Lead China analyst at Piper Jaffray and Company. He joined Piper Jaffray in 1997 and led the firm's expansion efforts in the Internet industry and, most notably, in expansion to China. Safa has published numerous research and industry reports on Online Advertising, Search, Chinese Internet market, and other segments of Internet Media and Technology. In 2007, Safa and his team published the ground breaking report on media and advertising, entitled, "The User Revolution – The New Advertising Ecosystem and the Rise of The Internet as a Mass Medium." The 400+ page report outlined key emerging themes that are changing the media and advertising world and also provided a major reference book for the online advertising industry, covering all aspects of the market with in-depth discussion and analysis. In addition to the User Revolution, Safa's regular weekly newsletter at Piper Jaffray, The Silk Road, was one of the most widely read and respected research publications in the industry. Safa is a frequent keynote speaker at select industry conferences in the U.S, Europe and Asia.
Larry Braitman
Larry was the founding CEO of Adify and lead the company through two financing rounds raising $28 million, co-created "white label" vertical advertising model and participated in launching first 100 networks including Forbes.com, Martha Stewart, ABC / Disney, The Guardian (UK), IDG Tech, and NBC. Adify was acquired by Cox Enterprises (cable, newspapers, etc.) in May, 2008, for $300 million. Larry enjoys working with smart, committed, passionate teams who never quit. Mr. Braitman is also an investor in Clever Sense.
