Greg Gretsch, Co-Chair, is a managing director at Sigma Partners with a thirteen-year background in technology, largely as an entrepreneur. Most recently he served as Vice President of Electronic Direct Marketing for Kana Communications after joining the company through Kana’s acquisition in 1999 of Connectify, Inc., which he co-founded in 1997. His first technology startup was Vicarious, an education and reference CD-ROM publisher, which he founded in 1993 and where he served as CEO. Greg has also held various management positions in IS, marketing and product marketing with companies including Arthur Andersen, Apple and Kaleida Labs. He received his B.B.A. in MIS from the University of Georgia.
Thomas Layton, Co-Founder and Co-Chair, is CEO of Metaweb. Thomas was CEO of OpenTable from 2001 to June 2007. Previously, he was a co-founder of CitySearch, Inc., which later merged with Ticketmaster and is now a subsidiary of USA Networks. Prior to his experience at Ticketmaster-CitySearch, Thomas was with Score Learning Corporation, a leading educational services company, where he served first as Chief Financial Officer and later as President and Chief Operating Officer. Thomas holds an MBA fro m the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a BS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute.
Steven Addis, Board Member, is the CEO of Addis Group, a prominent brand strategy and design firm. After beginning his career as a professional photographer, Steven entered brand management at The Clorox Company where he led the new products group. In 1987, Steven left Clorox to create a new breed of branding firm – the first of its kind to truly blend excellence in brand strategy and brand expression. Realizing this vision, Addis combines senior managers taken from the country’s top marketing companies with world-class designers and copywriters. Clients span numerous business categories and include Kelloggs, Intel, Dole, Annie’s Homegrown, Harrah’s, and UC Berkeley. Steven is also a director of the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
Doug Edwards, Board Member, was the first marketing director at Google, where he oversaw consumer marketing and brand management from 1999 to 2005. Prior to that, he managed marketing communications for the San Jose Mercury News, directed communications for KQED FM in San Francisco and was Novosibirsk correspondent for the public radio program Marketplace. He holds an honors degree in English from Brown University and was a Rotary Fellow at Nanzan Daigaku in Nagoya, Japan.
Lawrence Lessig, Board Member, is a director of the Edward J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Previously, he was a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining Stanford, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Professor Lessig has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.” He is the founder of Change Congress and Creative Commons. Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace. Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.