WHEN
June 13, 2007
WHAT
Gili Raanan will talk about his successful experience of building 2 new VC backed ventures (nLayers Inc, and Sanctum Inc), and selling them eventually. The discussion would cover the challenges of operating in the US market while having a major non-US group (in this case Israel based R&D group), considerations before forming similar companies, and a proposed empiric model to decide when to scale up the Sales team, and the rest of the US based operation, avoiding some common mistakes.
WHO
Gili Raanan serves as VP Strategy at EMC Corp, for its system management software division. Between 2003 and 2006 Raanan served as CEO & President of nLayers Inc. Raanan led nLayers from inception to about 50 employees company and the recognized leader in the Configuration Management market just before the acquisition by EMC. Between the years 1997-2002, Raanan founded and served as the General Manager & SVP Products of Sanctum Inc, till the acquisition by
Watchfire Inc. Prior to that Raanan led several key Internet projects at Amdocs Inc. and worked for the Israeli government in several key innovative software projects - For that work Raanan was awarded with the Israel Security Award of 1996. Raanan is also the recipient of the Israeli Defense Forces' Innovation award of 1992. Raanan has a Bachelor's degree in computer science and economics from Tel Aviv University, with honor, and MBA from the Recanati Business School, with honor. Raanan owns 4 US patents and 1 Israeli patent, with few pending applications.
PRESENTATION