Evert Schaeffer has over 25 years of experience in International Sales and Global Product Management of smart lighting systems, in both the business to consumer as business to business domain. Currently he is heading the International sales and application engineering teams for Digital Lumens Industrial IoT and Encelium Light Management in Europe, MEA, APAC and LATAM. At Signify he was head of the product management and partnership teams for Philips Hue.
Brett Bonner was formerly the Vice President of Research & Development/Operations Research at The Kroger Co., America’s largest grocery retailer. For nearly 14 years, Brett focused on creating sustainable competitive advantage by inventing advanced technologies and developing projects for retail and logistics that individually had at least a $50 million contribution.
Before joining Kroger, Brett served 25 years at Federal Express in various positions, including Technical Fellow, Managing Director of Scanning Technologies, and VP of FedEx Internet Technologies. During his time at FedEx, he invented and developed many diverse systems and his profit contribution for such systems exceeded $600 million per year.
Brett formerly served on the Zigbee Alliance Board of Directors, the TechPoint Advisory Board and others throughout his industrious career. His FAST Alerts system was featured in Popular Science and on national TV shows, won a 2015 CIO 100 award, and ranked #3 in InfoWorld Elite 100 for QueVision for 2014. He was awarded the 2013 Franz Edelman Laureate for Achievement in Management Science and 2010 Planet Retail Innovator of the Year. Brett is a named inventor on 33 US patents from Federal Express and Kroger.
Mr. Ling is a serial entrepreneur and investor with over 30 years of experience in building successful technology companies as a founder, CTO, CEO and venture capitalist. Mr. Ling has served as a board member of a dozen companies.
Mr. Ling founded three venture-backed technology start-up companies. ImpulseBuy (data-driven ad targeting) acquired by Inktomi (NASDAQ:INKT); AlterEgo (mobile/cloud-based web transcoding) acquired by Macromedia (NASDAQ:MACR); and MetaLincs (enterprise e-mail search) acquired by Seagate (NASDAQ:STX). These companies collectively raised over $50M in venture capital funding from top-tier venture funds, corporate and angel investors (including Mayfield Fund, Softbank, Canaan Partners, Granite Ventures, Arrowpath (ETrade), Newbury, Yahoo Inc, Interwoven, SRI (Stanford Research Institute), Frank Quatrrone, John Chambers among many others) and returned almost $350M in value to the investors.
Mr. Ling is a Founding General Partner of Rembrandt Venture Partners (RVP), established in 2004 to provide venture capital to early stage technology companies. RVP raised over $300 million under management in three funds that has invested in over 40 companies and has had over a dozen exits including Ironport (Cisco), Convio (IPO), MetaLincs (Seagate), LGC Wireless (ADC), Cavium (IPO), LiveRamp (Acxiom), Good Technology (Motorola), Xactly (IPO), Buysight (AOL) among others. Mr. Ling has also been an angel investor in over 20 companies including CommerceOne, Good Technology, ComScore, eBates, YesMail, Intuitive Surgical, Socializr, UserTesting.com, Atomic Labs, Hims&Hers, Facet Wealth, LEXI, Riptide, SuperWorld, Vectice, Irrigreen, etc. Mr. Ling holds several patents and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on the television program Business Today.
Mr. Ling holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley (robotics and control/learning systems focus).
Since 2016, Agadi has served as the president and chief executive officer of Crawford & Company before previously serving as the interim CEO. Additionally, Agadi currently serves as chairman of GHS Holdings, LLC and on the Board of Directors for Belmond Ltd. and Diversified Foodservice Supply, Inc.
Agadi has over 30 years of experience and has worked in multiple senior leadership roles, including five other CEO terms, throughout his career. His experience varies between food service and franchise companies to Fortune 500 companies. Some of the companies he has worked with include: Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc.; American Express; PepsiCo Inc.; General Foods and Orient Express Hotels. Agadi’s expertise lies in global growth for American companies and allows him the opportunity to travel around the country to speak at conventions, universities and professional associations.
Kurt is Founder and CEO of Modern Logic International, a niche market event management and ticketing application. Kurt continues to do 95% of the programming and system administration and the revenue from this business is funding his angel investments. He is also CTO of IT Capital, which mainly invests in mature software companies. Previously, Kurt was with Oracle Corporation for 16.5 years in various roles helping to design and build the Oracle E-Business Suite (ERP) software. He was also directly responsible for development and product management of other product families within the suite. His final role/title was VP Development/Chief Applications Architect responsible for design and architecture for the applications division, a team of over 5,000 engineers. Prior to Oracle, for 8 years Kurt was with Professional Computer Resources, an ERP software company that was acquired by Computer Associates. He helped build ERP applications for IBM Minicomputers, and later transitioned to consulting, pre-sales, and finally sales roles.
Kurt holds an MBA and a BA from the University of Chicago.
Ted is a product & tech visionary leader specializing in software as a service (SaaS). Over the span of his career he has been the CTO or head of product at 6 companies, most recently at PRO Unlimited Inc, and has 10 patents.
Bill has been CEO of two early-stage start-ups and has also held key operating roles at Motorola Mobility/Google, Canesta (acquired by Microsoft), Touch Revolution (acquired by TPK group), and General Instrument (acquired by Motorola) along with other start-up businesses. Most recently, Bill successfully led Matterport’s launch and growth as CEO, taking the company from pre-product to a dominant SaaS market position with $50M+ run rate within 4 1/2 years of product launch while building a significant data advantage to drive unique AI capabilities.
Bill has diverse industry experience in IoT/connected home, vertical SaaS for enterprise and SMB, AI, XR (AR, MR, VR), immersive 3D media, touch and 3D sensor tech, e-commerce, converged media, and social. Bill received his BS from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Brian leads Product Management for commercial smart lighting at Digital Lumens. Previously, Brian was Segment Manager, Retail & Hospitality, Philips Lighting North America leading strategy, planning, and performance for go to market, channel activation for professional retail and hospitality customers in North America with a particular focus on engaging early adopters with innovative offerings based on internet of things technologies.
Prior to that, Brian was Global Head of Indoor Lighting Systems, Philips Lighting North America. Brian holds a BSE in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University.
Cyril Brignone worked for the past 20 years as an entrepreneur, R&D leader and sales executive in the field of IoT and enterprise solutions where he has over 20 patents granted. He is the former CEO of Arrayent, a B2B IoT enterprise platform used by manufacturers including Whirlpool, Sylvania and P&G to launch their smart products.
Cyril sold the business in 2017 to Prodea Systems. Before joining Arrayent, he co-founded Vator.tv, an online portal for emerging startup companies to showcase themselves.
Cyril came to Silicon Valley in 2000 from France to work at Hewlett Packard Laboratories as a Senior Research Scientist Manager where he led a team of scientists developing IoT technologies and enterprise applications. Cyril holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France.
Hans brings 25 years experience in founding and leading innovative venture backed enterprise software and Web companies as CEO and GM for over 20 years.
Hans is recognized for pioneering $3B+ established software categories: Manufacturing Execution (MES) and Vendor Management (VMS). Significant successes: FASTech (#22 Inc. 500 in ’93) is now part of Applied Materials Global Services, WorldPlay which became AOL-EA Games, and eWork Group – a EU publicly traded company which helped pioneer the emerging human-cloud and is a still growing with $1.5B+ in revenues.
