Teleplace
GigaOM
"Billed as a 'virtual spaces for real work,' [Teleplace] is a user-friendly enterprise-level application built on the Croquet open-source virtual worlds platform."
Management Team
Greg Nuyens, Chief Executive Officer
Greg Nuyens has more than twenty-five years experience as a high tech entrepreneur, including founding and executive roles at both private enterprises and large public companies. He has served as CEO of Devicescape (backed by Kleiner Perkins and August Capital) CTO of Neomar (now part of Motorola), and chief technologist at Inktomi. Earlier roles included co-founder at Ilog (now part of IBM), director at Sun Microsystems and researcher at Xerox PARC and Xerox AI Systems.
Greg holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Carleton University.
David Smith, Chief Technology Officer
David Smith has been focused on interactive 3-D and using 3-D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment for almost twenty years. He created "The Colony", the very first 3-D interactive game and precursor to today's "first person shooters" like Quake...except Colony ran on a Macintosh in 1987. "The Colony" won the "Best Adventure Game of the Year" award from MacWorld Magazine.
In 1989, David used the technologies developed for the game to create a virtual set and virtual camera system that was used by Jim Cameron for the movie "The Abyss". Based upon this experience, David founded Virtus Corporation in 1990 and developed Virtus Walkthrough, the first real-time 3-D design application for personal computers. Walkthrough won the very first "Breakthrough Product of the Year" from MacUser Magazine.
The Croquet project is the culmination of David's work on 3-D component based architectures for the development and deployment of complex peer to peer environments including interactive entertainment. His first experiments in multi-user systems and interactive environments laid the groundwork for much of the architecture and user interface of Croquet.
David co-founded Red Storm Entertainment with Tom Clancy, and Timeline Computer Entertainment with Michael Crichton. He also co-founded Neomar, a wireless enterprise infrastructure company and 3DSolve, Inc. a simulation/training company.
Anne Dorman, Chief Financial Officer
Anne brings close to 30 years of Silicon Valley high-tech entrepreneurship experience to Teleplace.
Anne served as CFO of Advent Software, Ascend Communications (merged with Lucent, 1999), Atomic Vision (pre-IPO merger with Red Hat, 1999), Cholestech, Omniva Policy Systems (formerly Disappearing, Inc.), HealthCentral, Industrial Origami, Devicescape, Silicon Spice (merged with Broadcom, 2000), SKOLAR (merged with Wolters Kluwer), Synaptics, Treasury Services Corporation (merged with Oracle, 1997). Prior to that, she was employed by Arthur Young & Company (predecessor to Ernst & Young) from 1976 to 1985, where she was a founding member of the firm's Entrepreneurial Services Group.
Anne is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), holds an MBA, and is member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
Remy Malan, Vice President, Enterprise
Remy Malan is responsible for Sales and Marketing at Teleplace. He has more than twenty years experience working in technology. During the courses of his career he has held numerous sales and marketing roles at both startup companies and large public companies. Most recently before Teleplace, Remy was Vice President of Semiconductor Business for Devicescape Software, Inc. and was instrumental in forging many of the company's key licensing agreements. Remy was also Vice President of Marketing for AtWeb, an early Internet company where he managed marketing, web site sales and customer support and was instrumental in taking the company to break-even. AtWeb was acquired by AOL. Earlier in his career, Remy was a director of marketing at Sun for Solaris marketing to internet service providers.
Remy holds a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science from MIT.
Investors
Ammar Hanafi
General Partner, Alloy Ventures
Ammar H. Hanafi joined Alloy Ventures as a General Partner in 2005 from Cisco Systems. Ammar received a B.S. in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University and an MBA from Stanford University. His last role at Cisco was Vice President of New Business Ventures where he led new product efforts in the enterprise datacenter market. From 2000 to 2002, he was Vice President of Corporate Business Development and in that capacity, he was responsible for Cisco's acquisitions, acquisition integration, investment, and joint venture activity on a global basis. During Ammar's tenure, Cisco's Business Development Group completed over 50 acquisitions and made over $750 million in venture capital investments.
Prior to Cisco, Ammar held positions at PanAmSat Corporation, a global satellite services provider, and the investment banking firms of Morgan Stanley and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.
Alex Mendez
General Partner, Storm Ventures
Alex is a founding general partner of Storm Ventures. He was an investor and CEO/Chairman of Sanera Systems (acquired by McData) and served on the McData Board of Directors until 2007. He was also an investor/Board Member of Airespace (acquired by Cisco). His investment focus is on wireless, data centers (computing & storage) and software (Web 2.0 & Enterprise).
Prior to founding Storm Ventures in October 2000, Alex spent twenty-one years in high tech at ROLM, IBM, Stratacom, and Cisco, holding several executive positions, most recently as an SVP/GM at Cisco. He was part of the founding team of Stratacom which Cisco acquired in 1996. Alex holds a BSEE from Stanford University, and an MBA from Santa Clara University (he serves on the Advisory Board of the GSB). He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He likes to golf, travel, ski, and speaks both Spanish and German fluently.
Advisors
Kevin Brown
Kevin is an accomplished entrepreneur and executive, with experience in the software, networking, storage, and security sectors. Most recently, he served as President and CEO of Kidaro, a desktop virtualization software vendor, where he led the team to a leadership position in this emerging segment. The company outflanked large competitors to win top tier enterprise customers, and was acquired by Microsoft in May 2008.
Prior to joining Kidaro, Kevin served as a vice president on the original executive team of Decru, where he led worldwide marketing, business development, and product management. Following the acquisition of Decru by Network Appliance, Kevin helped the company achieve #1 market share and global adoption across the financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, and government sectors. As one of the leading experts on storage security, he served as an advisor to the U.S. Congress, Federal Trade Commission, and U.S. Department of Defense. Previously, Kevin was a key member of the founding team of Inktomi, a pioneering infrastructure software firm, where he served in a number of executive positions, including Vice President and General Manager of Inktomi's networking business. Kevin is as a Fellow at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, and earned his Bachelor's and MBA degrees at UC Berkeley, where he served as MBA class president.
Alan Kay
Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering "for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers," the Alan M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery "for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for funda-mental contributions to personal computing", and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation "for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization".
He has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and HP Senior Fellow. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children and learning. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, and an Adjunct Professor at MIT.
David Reed
David Reed is a MIT professor at the MIT Media Lab. Professor Reed's research focuses on designing systems that manage, communicate, and manipulate information shared among people. He is best known for co-developing the Internet design principle known as the "end-to-end argument", and "Reed's Law," which describes the economics of group formation in networks. Reed works in developing the MIT Media Lab's Viral Communications program, exploring the adaptive, scalable, and evolving wireless network architectures that have fascinated him for years. In addition, he has helped create the MIT Communications Futures Program.
