Board Of Directors
Melissa Simpler, CEO
See the Management page for a biography.
Art Lancaster, CTO
See the Management page for a biography.
John Doggett, JD
John N. Doggett is a Senior Lecturer of International Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainability at the McCombs School of Business of the University of Texas at Austin (UT). Professor Doggett is also a Senior Research Fellow at UT’s IC2 Institute and co-founder of UT’s International Idea to Product Competition™. He teaches Executive MBA seminars in Asia every summer and leads MBA students on two-week study tours to China.
In October 2000, e-company now magazine (now Business 2.0) selected Professor Doggett as one of nine people to know in Austin if you want to start a new business. Professor Doggett has extensive experience consulting with companies of all sizes, including Fortune 500 firms in the United States, Europe and Asia. He is currently an advisor to the senior management of Springer Maschinenfabrik AG, a leader in the European high speed sawmill equipment manufacturing industry and Lehr, Inc., the first producer of propane powered garden equipment. Since 2003, Professor Doggett has been a judge for the Dell, Inc. and National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Excellence Award.
Professor Doggett co-founded a Spanish-language television programming company and an international management consulting firm, was a McKinsey & Company consultant and practiced law for seven years. He received his law degree from Yale Law School, his MBA from Harvard Business School, and his BA from Claremont Men’s College.
John Hime
John Hime has been a mentor and angel investor to over 25 early-stage technology companies. His operational background includes jobs as the senior marketing executive at Tivoli Systems, MIPS Computers, Frame Technology and Sun Microsystems during their start-up phases. He actively participated in obtaining venture funding and preparing for the IPOs of these companies. His early career included positions as a computer systems engineer at Data General Corporation, and as an operating systems developer at Texas Instruments. He holds a BA degree in Mathematics from the University of Texas.
Advisory Board
John Greening
John Greening is a seasoned entrepreneurial executive with a strong track record of building products, solutions and organizations that deliver value to clients in the Broadband Communications industry. He has performed general management roles for both custom and packaged software development organizations, and has led Cable/Broadband practice sectors as a respected management consultant. As an operational executive at companies such as ISD (acquired by Convergys) and Arrowsmith Technologies, Mr. Greening has developed and implemented large scale software systems and data warehouses that served as the backbone for customer care, billing, marketing and campaign management within large Cable/Broadband service providers. The ICOMS product he brought to market at ISD – a platform that supports billing for video, high speed data and telephony – is operating today in over 30% of the Cable/Broadband market.
At Ernst & Young and successor Cap Gemini, Mr. Greening established and was lead partner in the Cable/Broadband market practice, which billed over $135 million in consulting services over a 7-year period. Mr. Greening holds a BSA and MBA from Tulane University.
Steve Waters
Steve Waters has spent the last 15 years turning emerging technology startups into high-growth, highly-valued market leaders. As an entrepreneur and serial Chief Marketing Officer, he has built revenue momentum and shareholder value across technology megatrends, diverse targeted audiences, disparate vertical industries, and wildly fluctuating economies. He is the Founder and CEO of Triggerbox, a pioneering technology-enabled advisory firm that focuses on startup value creation, market alignment and corporate development. In addition to Affinegy, he also holds advisory board positions at Moximity and OneSpot.
Prior to launching Triggerbox, Steve held marketing executive roles for a variety of leading firms spanning enterprise software, software as a service, and consumer internet business models, including B-Side, RightNow, and BetweenMarkets. As Chief Marketing Officer at interactive selling software provider Firepond, he grew product revenues from $0 to $50 million in three years, and managed the company’s $1.3 billion market cap IPO in 2000. As an early executive at Trilogy, he architected the vertical marketing and sales model that fueled the company’s explosive growth in the 1990s, and led a team that generated over $100 million in software license revenue over four years. Steve began his career as an analyst in the Silicon Valley investment banking industry, where he supported M&A and financing transactions for many technology segment leaders. He holds a B.A. in Sociology from Stanford University, with an emphasis on Organizational Behavior.
Pike Powers
Pike Powers is a super-lawyer-turned-entrepreneur whose leadership helped turn Austin from a university town into a high-tech powerhouse. Powers, a 1962 Lamar University graduate honored in 1978 as a Lamar Distinguished Alumnus, opened the Austin office of Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P. and served as its partner-in-charge from 1978 through 2004.
His leadership promoted a new creative spirit in the capital city – one that seized on global opportunities for economic development. That effort began in the governor’s office where Powers led in rallying the community toward the goal of landing the most prestigious economic development prize of the early 1980s – the Microelectronics Computer Technology Consortium (MCC).
For the past 30 years, Powers has played an integral role in developing the Austin regional technology economy. Through his leadership in attracting landmark research and development operations in the 1980s (MCC and SEMATECH) and employers (Applied Materials and 3M, among others), Powers has helped advance the region’s high-tech information and entrepreneurial economy. He has been a principal participant in mobilizing Austin’s ever-growing high-tech community to create a business / civic / philanthropic network. From his days in Governor Mark White’s Science and Technology Council from 1983-1986 to Governor Rick Perry’s Science and Bio-Technology Council in 2002-2003, he has been active in the business community and in legal and charitable organizations at the national, state and local levels. He was vice chair of the $200 million Texas Emerging Technology Fund. Powers was and is a leader in creating the Texas Technology initiative, established in 2002 to redefine and reinvigorate the collaboration between government, academia and private industry. In response to this strategy and the need to stay globally competitive with incentive programs, the State of Texas created a $295 million Enterprise Fund in 2003.
Pike is a recipient of numerous awards that celebrate his excellence and passion in law, economic development and civic entrepreneurship. To name a few, Pike received the first Austin Business Journal Lifetime Achievement (2003) for his contributions to the economic development of Austin and Central Texas; was named “Texas Legend” by American Electronics Association (2008); and selected as Distinguished Lawyer by the Austin Bar Association (2009).