Management Team
Investors
Board of Directors

Board of Directors

Conrad Burke - Innovalight

Mr. Burke brings over 17 years of proven expertise guiding innovative semiconductor and optical technologies into the commercial market.

Prior to Innovalight, Conrad was senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Bookham Inc. Before Bookham, Mr. Burke was a venture partner at Sevin Rosen Funds, a leading US-based venture capital firm. His career has spanned research and development, product management, marketing, sales, general management and operations in major global organizations, NEC, AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Agere Systems. He was also the first executive hire at OMM Inc., a venture backed startup based in San Diego, California focused on developing MEMS based optical switching systems. He has deep international experience having lived in and run major divisions of these large companies in Germany, UK and Japan.

Conrad represented Innovalight at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland in 2006 to receive The Technology Pioneer Award for Environmental and Energy Technologies.

Conrad has a MS in Physics from Trinity College, Dublin, a BS in Physics from University College, Dublin, Ireland and he has also attended The London Business School.

Michael Kim - Rustic Canyon Partners

Michael Kim is a Northern California partner of Rustic Canyon Partners, a $900 million private equity and venture capital firm based in Santa Monica. Michael joined Rustic Canyon Partners from Accelerator Venture Partners, a San Francisco-based partnership that invests in early stage technology companies.

Formerly an investment banker, Michael was with Morgan Stanley's Technology Mergers and Acquisitions Group in Menlo Park. Michael was directly involved with 27 announced transactions worth over $77 billion for such clients as Hewlett-Packard, Ciena, Seagate, Bay Networks, Netscape and Texas Instruments. Prior to Morgan Stanley, Michael was an associate at The Chase Manhattan Bank in NYC and also worked at IBM.

He is an honors graduate of Cornell University, has an MS from the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. Michael is on the board of directors for the following Rustic Canyon portfolio companies: Archcom, Auxora, Azaire Networks, Capella, EM4, Insync, NanoNexus and TwoFish.

Michael is the Chairman of Lead21, an organization that enables entrepreneurs to advocate free market public policy, and serves on the board of the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank that champions freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility for all individuals by advancing free market policy solutions. He is a Trustee of the Asian Art Museum Foundation, and the former Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Symphonix League of the San Francisco Symphony. In March 2004, Michael was appointed by the Mayor of San Francisco as a Trustee of the San Francisco Employee Retirement System, a $17 billion pension fund, where he presently serves as the President of the Board.

Larry Schwerin - Capella, President and CEO

Larry brings more than 20 years of firsthand experience in telecommunications, technology, and venture capital to his role as President and CEO.

Most recently, Larry was General Partner at Vanguard Ventures where he sat on the Board of Directors at Capella. Larry was President and CEO of CenCom V, a venture/corporate sponsored business accelerator focused on the telecommunications market. Prior to CenCom V, Larry was founder and General Manager of Lucent Technologies' Wireless Broadband Networks Division, responsible for developing a market leadership position for wireless broadband services around the world. Larry spent twelve years at Bell Laboratories where he was Director of AT&T's Global Fiber Access Systems.

Larry graduated with highest honors with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University, and achieved highest honors with a Master in Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

Kip Sheeline - Levensohn Venture Partners

Kip is a Managing Director at Levensohn Venture Partners, where he focuses on the software and communications sectors. LVP leads investments in companies at the early stage of commercialization and works closely with the management teams an d other directors on the strategic and execution issues associated with rapid company growth. Kip joined LVP from the Summit Accelerator Fund (SAF), which he co-founded in 1999 as a joint venture with Summit Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm.

Prior to Summit , Kip spent 11 years at Hambrecht & Quist, specializing in communications, software and Internet infrastructure. As Managing Director of the communications industry practice at H&Q, Kip was responsible for all of its investment banking activities related to communications, including software, systems, components and services. Prior to H&Q, Kip was Managing Director, Technology Planning at PacTel Corp. (a unit of the Pacific Telesis Group) and worked in software development and international marketing at Oracle Corp., where he was one of the company's earliest employees.

Kip received his BA and an MA in Computer Music from Stanford University and holds a Ph.D. in Psychoacoustics from Stanford Medical School.

Bert Zaccaria

Mr. Zaccaria has been an entrepreneur, CEO, and valued-added board member in the Information Technology arena for more than 25 years.

He was a founder and CEO of Xidex Magnetics. One year after a successful IPO, Xidex Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, purchased Magnetics. He then went on to serve as COO and CEO of the combined companies until they were sold to Anacomp.

Anticipating the growth in optical storage technology, Mr. Zaccaria founded Triptych CD Corporation and served as its Chairman and CEO, The Company was acquired by AmericDisc.

Mr. Zaccaria served on the Board of Directors of Quinta Corporation, which was sold to Seagate. He was Chairman of Das Devices, which was sold to Applied Magnetics.

Mr. Zaccaria's accomplishments have been recognized by several organizations, including the Harvard Business School Alumni Association, which honored him with an Entrepreneur of the Year Award (shared); and Rochester Institute of Technology, who elected him Alumnus of the Year. He was also awarded personal and unit citations while serving off the coast of Vietnam as a Naval Officer.

Emeritus Board Member

Joseph E. Davis - Co-founder

The 30-year career of Joe Davis is one of combining imaginative technical innovation with sound business practices to set new industry standards. His areas of specialization have included wavelength selective switches, tunable lasers, magnetic and optical disk drives, as well as such related technologies as optical switches, micro-optics, and micro-machining.

Prior to his retirement, Joe served as the company's CEO from 2000-2004, and subsequently as the Chairman. He co-founded Capella in 2000. Preceding that, he was co-founder and interim COO of Iolon, a Seagate spinoff that focused on tunable lasers for telecommunications. In 1996, he co-founded Quinta Corporation and served as its CTO, where he co-invented a multi-disk data-storage architecture that combined the best features of magnetic and optical technologies. Quinta was sold to Seagate in 1997. Joe has also held senior executive positions with several successful public companies including Maxtor, Seagate, and SyQuest.

Joe received his MS and Ph.D. degrees in aeronautics, with a Ph.D. minor in business economics, from the California Institute of Technology. He holds 26 patents in the fields of optical subsystems, MEMS devices, and magneto-optical data storage and is the author of publications in several fields.