CoolTech Club panel of Startup Founders : Made in Israel

WHEN

March 27,2008

WHAT

Celebrating Israel's 60 birthday!

Panel of Israeli/Silicon Valley startups Founders talk about Israeli high-tech, personal experience of founding diverse, distributed companies, challenges of multi-cultural management and so on.

WHO

 

Shai Fultheim, Founder & President, ScaleMP

ScaleMP has developed the versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture, a unique approach that enables server vendors to create industry-standard, high-end x86-based symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) systems. The vSMP architecture is implemented through the vSMP Foundation firmware which, combined with standard hardware components, enables large shared memory systems ranging from 8 to 64 CPUs in size.

As founder and CTO, Shai defined and architected the core technology behind ScaleMP and is responsible for the company’s technology roadmap, product strategy and direction. Shai’s career spans a broad range of technology and business experiences in IT and venture backed firms. Before founding ScaleMP, Shai was CTO of BRM Capital, a first-tier Israeli venture-capital fund. Shai defined the fund’s technology roadmap, which formed the foundation of BRM’s strategy and he was a key voice on the fund’s investment committee, providing the technical perspective for all investment decisions.

Ahikam Kaufman , CoFounder & COO , PageOnce

PageOnce gets you everything you want, and nothing you don’t. Our FetchOnce™ technology grabs your most relevant stuff, from the websites you care about. You can get bank info, bills that are due, cell phone minutes, emails, and what’s coming next from Netflix all in one place - all without ever having to logon or surf to multiple websites. PageOnce makes the internet “password-free” by handling every username and logon for you. PageOnce becomes your Personal Internet Assistant, helping you manage all your web accounts and improving your internet experience.

Ahikam brings over 16 years of experience in corporate finance and business operations, including sales operations, business analysis, M&A, financial reporting and financial systems. Prior to PageOnce, Ahikam served in an executive role in the sales operations organization in HP software. Before that, Ahikam spent 6 years in various leadership positions in the Finance organization at Mercury Interactive. Prior to that, Ahikam served as the CFO of Conduct Software, a venture-backed start-up acquired by Mercury in 1999 and before that Ahikam spent 4 years with Arthur Andersen. Ahikam holds a bachelor degree in Economics and an LL.M. in Law from the Bar-Ilan University, Ahikam is also a Certified Public Accountant.

Eyal Gura - CoFounder and CEO, PicScout

PicScout is the leading technology services provider to the digital content industry. For years, the company’s flagship ImageTracker™ has been the industry standard application for helping visual assets owners control and monitor the distribution of their proprietary images across all media. Through its PicApp platform (www.picapp.com), PicScout allows online publishers to quickly and easily post creative and editorial images to blogs and web sites. PicScout headquarters are in San Francisco. The company has a development and operations center in Herzelia, Israel.

Eyal Gura co-founded PicScout and has led it to become the Image Tracking market leader. Gura oversees the company sales, business development and product initiatives. Previously to PicScout, he founded the first online video recruiting hub - TheScouter.com. Eyal is a graduate of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program of IDC Herzliya and completes these days the Wharton Business School EMBA program.

Jon Aizen, CTO & CoFounder, Dapper

Dapper is a free, web-based service that allows anyone to extract and use information from any website on the Internet. It allows non-programmers to create a "feed" from any website and then use the feed in a variety of ways: as an RSS feed, a widget, in Facebook applications, and more. Developers use the Dapper platform to construct new applications, websites, and devices using a variety of web content. Dapper is building a next generation semantic ad network on top of its platform, creating the ability to scalably create mini mashup ads that combine content from publishers and advertisers in a highly dynamic and engaging advertisement.

Jon Aizen, a Cornell Computer Science graduate has been engineering web applications since 1994. He has extensive experience with managing large-scale, high-profile web projects. His previous experience includes Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive. At Dapper, Jon serves as founder and CTO, managing US operations and strategic partnerships for the company in San Francisco.

Shahar Nechmad, Founder and CEO , NuConomy

NuConomy go beyond the old page view model and start to measure the new metrics of the web – your users and site engagement and contribution metrics.
Traditional site measurement tools give you so little actionable information, you’re shooting in the dark as you try to guess what your users want. But NuConomy believes that today’s next-generation Web sites need to drive user experience from the most accurate source – deep understanding of the online activities of the users themselves. NuConomy Studio provides you with actionable reports, allowing you to streamline the user experience to directly support your business goals, whether you’re trying to maximize ad revenue, or sell the most profitable products in your catalog.
Shahar Nechmad is the Founder and CEO of NuConomy, a next generation Analytics and Advertising company. With more than 10 years of experience, Shahar has extensive experience in delivering technological solutions. As the business development manager of Microsoft MTC in Israel, Shahar was responsible for developing company business and marketing strategy. In addition, Shahar has years of experience as a senior Microsoft Architect, helping business throughout Europe. Shahar led some of the biggest development projects in the world, assisting companies such as Cup Gemini , Accenture and Bearing Point . Shahar is also a leading speaker for Microsoft Israel and has years of lecturing experience at conferences such as MS Tech Ed and Dev Days.
Shahar now lives in the small and lively city of San Francisco.

David Reichman, Founder and CEO , TripWiser

TripWiser is a young, innovative company with a great vision to connect people with places and build a community of travelers, where people with common interests can share places, travel advice, trip plans and experiences in a more intuitive manner across all social networks and devices. @ TripWiser, we believe that travel is about having fun, exploring new places, and creating lifelong memories with friends. We also believe that a trusted community (start with your own social graph) is the ultimate source of unbiased, travel advice.
David Reichman is the Founder and CEO of TripWiser, David drives TripWiser strategy and commercialization. (We also let him design some of screens:) While recently trying to plan a family trip to Costa Rica, David realized that relevant and personalized travel information that could be trusted was very difficult to find online. As a result, TripWiser was born. David was previously VP of Products & General Manager at Mercury interactive and a co-founder in an Israeli security startup.

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart