About Affinegy

Melissa Simpler

Melissa Simpler has a rich and diversified background with proven results in business development, strategic planning, marketing, product development and applications engineering. She co-founded Affinegy in March of 2003, and as CEO, directs business strategy, company operations, marketing and sales.  Using her strong combination of business acumen and engineering expertise, Simpler has guided the sales activities, signing on industry leading companies that distribute Affinegy’s software worldwide with over 7M households to date. She has also developed partnerships with application providers that add breadth to the home user’s connected lifestyle and strategically built out the Affinegy internal team and external Advisory Board with veteran, industry specific talent.

Previously she served in corporate business and engineering management roles at Motorola, Dell, and National Instruments.  Simpler has a BSEE, cum laude, and MBA from the University of Texas. A member of the Executive Women’s Forum and Tech Women CEO Network, Melissa is also actively contributing to growing the Austin Technology Council’s corporate membership. She has been chosen as a mentor for the University of Texas’ 1 Semester Startup program. This class gives the students a chance to experience entrepreneurship first hand by starting companies with assistance from some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Austin.

Art Lancaster

Art Lancaster co-founded Affinegy in March 2003 and has served as CTO since, where he is responsible for technology strategy and product development. As CTO, Art led the development of DigiDo, delivering the first release in just six months. In deployment since 2004, DigiDo has proven robust, enabling self-install service deployments and silencing calls to support desks at some of the world’s largest service providers. Art’s commitment to quality is further evidenced by Affinegy’s near-zero defect record in over four years of volume deployment. Prior to Affinegy he was director of strategy and business development for Motorola’s Streamaster business where Art established strategies leading to the world’s most advanced interactive broadband gateway system and closed $20 million of sales with top telecommunications companies. While director of design engineering for Motorola’s Fast Static RAM Division, he contributed to sales growth of over 50% per year to over $500 million and #1 market share worldwide. Art has prior start-up experience at Entregate, Inmos Corporation, and as co-founder and VP of development of a joint venture between RCA and Sharp. He has a BSEE, cum laude, from the University of Missouri, an MSEE from the University of Southern California, and an MBA from the University of Texas. Art remains actively involved with UT’s leading entrepreneurship program and has been a regular judge in the UT MOOT Corp business plan competitions.

Claire Campbell-Seeger

Claire Campbell-Seeger brings over 20 years of marketing communications experience in the software industry to Affinegy. Claire most recently was a Product Marketing Manager for a network management product at Motorola, driving development and sales of the product. Previously she was Director of Corporate Communications at Wireless Valley Communications. She was the company’s first marketing person and led a variety of activities including developing the company positioning, lead generation programs, marketing collateral, website and public relations activities; Wireless Valley was strategically acquired by Motorola a year later. She was also Director of Public Relations at Motive, Inc. where she managed the company's global external communications activities from company launch to its growth into a $100M organization. Prior to Motive, she directed public relations for Tivoli Systems during its IPO and subsequent purchase by IBM. Claire has also served in marketing roles at Deja News, Novell, Inc. and Macola, Inc. She started her career as a radio news reporter and talk show host. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Communications from Bowling Green State University.

Todd Greer

Todd Greer is an avid software development expert and brings over 10 years of architecture, implementation and product development leadership. As Director of Development, Todd has recruited and cultivated an execution-driven team of exceptional software developers with a demonstrated history of producing a reliable series of high-quality releases that meet and exceed customer needs. Prior to joining Affinegy, Todd founded TSG Software, and was previously a key contributor to the development of the LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control SCADA Toolkit, BridgeVIEW, and Lookout at National Instruments. Todd holds a BS in Computer Sciences, cum laude, from The University of Texas at Austin.

John Doggett

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.

Larry Warnock

Larry is currently CEO and President of Gazzang and is responsible for the company’s leadership, operations and strategic direction. He is the former president and CEO of Phurnace Software, a leading developer of software that accelerates the deployment and configuration of Java-based web applications. Acquired by BMC Software in 2009, the software continues to be an important and rapidly growing product for BMC. Before joining Phurnace, Larry was the chief marketing officer at Vignette, a publicly traded enterprise content management software company. He was also a venture partner at AV Labs (the company incubator for Austin Ventures), where he assisted with the incubation of several early-stage software companies. Before joining AV Labs, Larry served as vice president of marketing at OnLink Technologies (acquired by Siebel Systems). He also served as vice president at Documentum from startup phase to successful IPO to its position as a market leader and eventual EMC acquisition. Larry earned a bachelor of business administration in marketing from Texas A&M University, and is a frequent lecturer at the Mays School of Business at Texas A&M University, the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the Acton Entrepreneurial MBA program at Hardin-Simmons University. Larry also serves on the executive committee of the board of directors for the Austin Technology Council (ATC), a non-profit focusing on the advancement of the technology community in Central Texas.

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).