Moderator of BVC's 2012 Launch Stage Panel:
Dino Vendetti of Formative Ventures
Dino Vendetti is an entrepreneur, mentor, and early stage investor in software, web,and mobile start-ups. He’s currently Managing Director Formative Ventures in Menlo Park and a founder of Bend-based tech accelerator FoundersPad. He is an experienced operating executive who spent the majority of his career in Marketing, Business Development, and Engineering roles at startups including Qualcomm. Prior to joining Formative, Dino was a General Partner at BayPartners and at Vulcan Ventures. His current investments include InboundWriter, Manzama, Capella, Vungle, and Adept Cloud. Dino earned his MSEE and MBA degrees from the University of Washington and a bachelor of science in Electrical Engineering from San Diego State University.
Diane Fraiman serves as a Venture Partner with Voyager Capital in Portland and focuses on software and digital media investments in the Pacific Northwest, particularly Oregon. With over 30 years of technology company experience in leading marketing, strategy and business development, Diane works with startups in the enterprise software, Internet/Web 2.0, and security software industries throughout the West Coast. A tech executive prior to joining Voyager, Diane has worked for Sanctum, Informix Software, Sequent Computer, DEC, and Tektronics.
Shelley Gunton is a past winner of Angel Oregon, and now an angel investor and Executive Director of the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CIE) at Portland State University. Gunton has quite a few ideas about entrepreneurship in Oregon. She is the former "Top Dog" of Castor & Pollux Pet Works, founded in 1999, which she and her husband Brian successfully built and then sold in 2010.Gunton chaired the Angel Oregon Conference in 2011, and in her role at the CIE she is responsible for building infrastructure to support and catalyze entrepreneurship and innovation across the campus and with the Oregon Health Sciences University. The CIE helps create new companies and elevate PSU's profile as a hub for innovation and entrepreneurial activity.
Panelist Kevin
Ober is a Managing Director of Divergent Ventures and is a director of Internap
Network Services Corporation and SpaceCurve and a board observer with Flashsoft
and Piston Cloud Computing. Prior to Divergent, he spent 7 years with Vulcan
Ventures, a national venture capital firm owned by Paul Allen, co-founder of
Microsoft Corporation. While with Vulcan, he led investments in Internet
Infrastructure companies Internap Network Services Corporation, Nexabit
Networks, Wavtrace and Net Perceptions. Other investments included Command
Audio, Capstone Turbine, Colorado Micro Displays, ShareWave, Terastor and
Netschools.
Prior to working at Vulcan Ventures, Ober served in various positions at Conner Peripherals, Inc., a computer hard disk drive manufacturer in San Jose California. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from St. John’s University and a Master of Business Administration from Santa Clara University.