Who's Who in High-Tech
Jeffrey Barnes
Executive Producer and CEO
Computer Café

Jeff Barnes and his partner David Ebner started Computer Café in 1993 with one Amiga computer in a ten-by-ten room in Santa Maria. Today, the company has offices in Santa Maria and Santa Monica and has done graphic animation for clients including Walt Disney Studios, Miramax Pictures, HBO and NBC.

Computer Café specializes in character animation and photo-realistic effects, and has worked on the movies "Armageddon," "Battlefield Earth" and "Flubber."

Barnes, 38, graduated from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in radio, TV and film and a minor in business.

Dennis Cagan
Founder and Director
Santa Barbara Technology Incubator

Dennis Cagan founded his first company 32 years ago, and since then he's been both an active entrepreneur and a nationally recognized expert on software, hardware and communications technology. His latest venture utilizes that experience to help up-and-coming entrepreneurs: in May of this year he founded the Santa Barbara Technology Incubator.

The incubator helps to fund, house and mentor start-ups building businesses in the areas of Internet software and services, and computer and communications software and devices. Its investors include Silicon Valley Bank and Compaq Computer.

Cagan has founded over a dozen companies, and has sat on the board of directors for over 30 companies and charities, including Software.com and Wavefront Technologies.

Cagan, 55, graduated from UCLA with a degree in economics and later served in the U.S. Marine Corps. He lives in Santa Barbara with his wife and children. 

Jeff Carmody
Managing Member
Agility Capital

Through Agility Capital and his many other ventures, Jeff Carmody helps entrepreneurs find and manage the money necessary to make their visions reality.

He is a board member of the Central Coast MIT Enterprise Forum, a non-profit that offers advice, contacts and resources to tech entrepreneurs. He also founded Venture Investment Partners, which connects entrepreneurs with high net worth individuals in an informal setting.

Carmody is an active member of the Central Coast Venture Forum Steering Committee, another organization that connects entrepreneurs with potential investors.

Corwin C. Corpuz
Co-Founder
IP Muse

Chris Corpuz's IP Muse is an angel capital group - the organization is in on the ground floor, making lead seed investments in early-stage companies and pre-IPO funding rounds.

Corpuz has served as an executive for a number of companies IP Muse has funded. He is acting CFO of Envenergy and CEO of Farmdex. Farmdex, founded by Santa Maria's Kieran Adam, is a technology/agriculture startup with the first direct digital exchange for produce.

Corpuz, 43, holds a bachelor's degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and master's degrees from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern. 

Brian Coryat
Vice Chairman and Founder
ValueClick

Brian Coryat found a new way to sell advertising on the Internet, and in June he was rewarded with the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the greater Los Angeles area, in the new category of e-commerce.

Coryat founded ValueClick in 1998 with a new business model; instead of charging clients based on how many customers viewed their ads, ValueClick uses a performance-based model called "cost-per-click," which charges based on how many customers actually click on the ads.

ValueClick outgrew its Carpinteria office earlier this year and moved to Westlake Village. There the company has more physical space for its 100-plus local employees, as well as better access to the Los Angeles labor pool.

ValueClick is now the fourth-largest cost-per-click company, and has offices in Japan, Germany, England, France and Brazil.

Rick Davis
President and CEO
Ants.com

Rick Davis came to Ants.com in 1999 with over 20 years of experience in management of high-tech companies, including Kinko's, Claris Software and Apple Computer.

Ants.com, an online freelance marketplace, is growing at around one percent per day, and now has over 70,000 members and over 70 categories of jobs. Based in Santa Barbara, Ants.com helps companies around the world outsource projects to the largest pool of qualified freelancers in the world.

Davis holds a bachelor's degree from UC Davis and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Robert Duggan
Chairman and CEO
Computer Motion

Thanks to innovations by Goleta's Computer Motion, minimally invasive, closed-chest heart bypass surgery is now possible - and in the future, this surgery may be performed by a surgeon thousands of miles away from the patient.

Robert Duggan joined Computer Motion in 1990. Under his leadership, the company has developed a wide range of robotic devices that allow a surgeon's movements to be translated into small-scale motions by the robot. Computer Motion's technology has already been used in the first minimally invasive kidney removal, and one day it could be used for intercontinental remote surgery.

Duggan, 55, majored in economics at UC Santa Barbara, and he now serves on the UCSB Foundation Board of Trustees. He has also been a board member of the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra Association and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Earlier this year he was awarded the French government's Legion of Honor award.

Michael Edell
Chairman, President and CEO
eLabor.com

Michael Edell has been at the head of eLabor.com since 1988, helping the company grow exponentially as it adapts to the Internet age.

eLabor.com, headquartered in Camarillo, provides complete solutions for labor-related functions, from payroll to labor laws to intellectual capital.

Under Edell's leadership, the company has grown 75 to 100 percent per year since 1994, and Edell has twice been nominated for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. In 1999, Deloitte & Touche named eLabor.com to its "Fast 50" list as one of Southern California's fastest growing technology companies.


Dan Firestone
President and CEO
Somera Communications

Since founding Somera Communications in 1995, Dan Firestone has guided the company to its position as one of the most consistently prosperous technology companies on the South Coast.

Somera provides telecommunications services and equipment to clients around the world, helping them to build, expand and streamline their networks. 

Prior to launching Somera, Firestone ran a private consulting firm. In the 1980s, he oversaw the $40 million growth and eventual sale of Century Computer Marketing, a distributor of computer spare parts and related products.

Lori Fisher
President
Kiosk Software

Kiosks - freestanding computer terminals in public places such as supermarkets and shopping malls - are an example of how computers have crept into our lives in ways most people never consider. Lori Fisher considers them, and that is why she is a successful entrepreneur.

Fisher founded The Kiosk Company, which eventually became Kiosk Software, in 1993. Kiosk software is crucial now that kiosks are largely Web-enabled.

In 1999 AmeriComUSA acquired the company, and today Fisher also serves as vice president of technology for the parent company. At last summer's Kiosk Com2000 exposition and conference, Kiosk Software's Kiosk Remote Manager was named Best of Show for software design.

Fisher, 45, holds a master's degree in computer science from UC Davis and lives in San Luis Obispo, where she tutors young girls in mathematics. 

Dirk Gates
President, Chairman and CEO
Xircom

Xircom, the company Dirk Gates founded in 1988 at age 27, is at the forefront of the wireless revolution. When he founded the company, Gates created the Pocket LAN Adapter, the industry's first tool for connecting notebook computers to local area networks.

Xircom continues to design products that connect mobile users to corporate networks and the Internet. The company is headquartered in Thousand Oaks and has 1,900 employees worldwide.

In 1992, Gates received the High Technology Entrepreneur of the Year award for the greater Los Angeles area from Ernst & Young. In 1994, Forbes Magazine named him to its "Whiz Kid" list of the five youngest CEOs of America's best small companies.

Gates holds a bachelor's degree from Cal State Northridge and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

Mark Goldston
Chairman and CEO
NetZero

Over the past year and a half, Mark Goldston has overseen NetZero's growth to its current standing as world's second-largest Internet service provider.

When Goldston took over in March 1999, the company had 400,000 subscribers; NetZero now brings free Internet access to over 5 million people. The company had a successful $184 million IPO in September 1999, and NetZero recently announced a partnership with Qualcomm to extend its reach to the wireless Internet.

In the early 1980s, Goldton was senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Revlon, where he introduced the first mass-market anti-aging skincare product in 1985. He moved on to Faberge, where he became, at 31, the youngest person to head a Fortune 500 consumer products company. In 1989, while chief marketing officer at Reebok, Goldston created and introduced The Pump, one of 12 patents he holds.

Goldston, 45, holds undergraduate degrees in marketing and finance from Ohio State University and an MBA from Northwestern University's J.L. Kellogg School. He currently serves on the Dean's Advisory Board of both the Kellogg School and Ohio State's Fisher School of Business.

Eric David Greenspan
President and CEO
Push

As more and more software applications move from the desktop to the Internet, the market for application service providers (ASPs) like Push will continue to grow.

Push hosts software applications on its servers so clients can have access to software programs without having to worry about hardware, servers, installation, maintenance or updates. In 1995, Eric Greenspan founded Make It Work, Inc., an e-business service provider that repositioned itself as an ASP and became Push in 1999. Push's partners include Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Sprint.

Greenspan, 32, holds a bachelor's degree in law and society from UC Santa Barbara.

Brian Gregory
Software Engineering Manager and Santa Barbara Site Manager
Cisco Systems

Brian Gregory is at the helm of Cisco Systems' sizable Santa Barbara operation. Engineers in Goleta work on the core technologies of Cisco's billion-dollar telephony and multimedia products division, which includes voice/video/data convergence.

Cisco acquired Santa Barbara's StrataCom in 1996, and Gregory relocated from the Silicon Valley to run the newly acquired office. Cisco consistently ranks among the world's largest companies by market capitalization, and its arrival in Santa Barbara coincided with the region's emergence as a tech hotbed.

Gregory is chair of the Santa Barbara Industrial Association, and he works with a number of other local organizations and non-profits. A native of San Francisco, he holds a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.

Pamela Lopker
Chairman and President
QAD Inc.

Pam Lopker founded QAD in 1979, and the company has since made her one of the richest and most successful women in the country.

QAD provides both products and services for business-to-business e-commerce, including a suite of software used by companies including Pepsi, Ford Motor Company, Johnson & Johnson and Kraft International.

In 1996, Lopker made the Forbes 400, and the magazine called her the "richest self-made woman" on the list.

Lopker graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1976. Her many award and honors include: Entrepreneur of the Year by both the USC School of Business (1998) and Ernst & Young (1996); induction into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame in 1997 and the UCSB Distinguished Alumni Award in 1998.

John MacFarlane
CEO, Founder and Director
Software.com

John MacFarlane is one of Santa Barbara's true technology success stories.

He founded Software.com in 1993, basing the company on the vision that the Internet would become a tool for mass consumer communication. Software.com is now a leading provider of carrier-scale Internet infrastructure applications - products that allow customers including AT&T, Hewlett Packard and Cisco Systems to support millions of e-mails and other messages a day.

In August, Software.com was purchased for $6.4 billion in stock by the Silicon Valley's Phone.com, a company that provides applications for wireless Internet access. In the past year, Software.com's stock has soared by over 100 percent, bringing MacFarlane's paper worth after the merger to nearly $1 billion.

Prior to founding Software.com, MacFarlane worked for defense contractors and the U.S. Navy on military communications systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a master's degree in electrical engineering from UC Santa Barbara. 

Bertrand Meyer
President and Chief Technology Officer
Interactive Software Engineering

Bertrand Meyer is an internationally known pioneer in modern software technology. His latest triumph came earlier this year when Microsoft announced it would use Eiffel, Meyer's object-oriented programming language, in the company's .NET technology, the cornerstone of all of Microsoft's new products.

Meyer is a former professor at UCSB and has authored several best-selling books and presented numerous keynote addresses at software conferences in the U.S., Europe and Australia.

A native of France, Meyer holds master's degrees in computer science and Russian literature, as well as a Ph.D. from the University of Nancy, France.

Anthony E. Papa
Chairman and CEO
NetLojix Communications

Since Santa Barbara's NetLojix was founded in 1996, Papa has served as CEO, President and Chairman of the Board. He leads a company that provides network solutions ranging from communications to information technology support to e-business infrastructures.

Prior to joining NelLojix, Papa held executive positions at two major telecommunications firms: ICS Communications, a national provider of cable television, wireless, local and long-distance telephone service, and Spectradyne, the largest provider of pay-per-view entertainment and interactive services to the hospitality industry.

Papa is a director of the International School of Information Management and a director of the academic publisher ABC-Clio. He holds a bachelor's degree in management from Iona College in New Rochelle, New York.

Frank Peters
Founder and Chairman
Franklin Telecommunications

Frank Peters has 35 years of experience in high tech business development. He has developed network products for Citibank, Reuters, and other banks around the world.

Franklin Telecommunications, based in Westlake Village, designs and builds hardware for Internet telephony. As Franklin Data Systems, the company introduced the first store and forward messaging switch on a PC. Peters sold Franklin to Exxon in 1980, then reacquired it in 1984.

Peters holds a bachelor's degree in physics from UCLA and has worked as a nuclear engineer for Rockwell International.

John Poe
President and CEO
Semtech

Semtech has taken off since John Poe became president and CEO in 1985. In addition to acquiring several companies, Semtech has built its pool of intellectual property and driven profit margins near 50 percent, recording record earnings for five years in a row.

Semtech, based in Newbury Park, manufactures semiconductors and circuits used primarily in the high-speed communications market. The company has offices and factories across the U.S. and Europe.

In 1997, Poe was named one of the top CEOs in the industry to Electronic Buyer's News. He holds a bachelor's degree in accounting and an MBA from the University of Montana.

Klaus Schauser
Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Expertcity.com

Klaus Schauser, both an academic and an entrepreneur, used his down time while teaching at UC Santa Barbara to start an award-winning Web site.

Expercity.com offers Web-based live help, giving customers access to a real expert to solve their technology problems. The site has been named to PC Magazine's Top 100 Sites and Forbes' Best of the Web.

Schauser, an associate professor of computer science at UCSB, holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley. 

Lex Sisney
CEO
Commission Junction

Commission Junction's network of over 1,000 merchants and 300,000 content Web sites provides its clients with a suite of marketing, management, recruitment and administrative services delivered on-demand via the Internet. Content sites use Commission Junction's network to find the perfect advertising to match their content. Customers can expect an increase of 15 to 40 percent in their revenues when dealing with Commission Junction.

Lex Sisney co-founded Commission Junction in Santa Barbara in 1998. Prior to leading Commission Junction, Sisney founded and served as president of Procurelink, an e-procurement firm. In the past year, Sisney, 30, has lead Commission Junction through rapid growth - the company has gone from 50 to 150 employees since January.

Jens Steenstrup
President
Reson

Reson is using acoustics and ultrasonics to increase our understanding of one of the world's few remaining unexplored areas: the ocean floor.

Jens Streenstrup and his two brothers founded the company in 1976 and moved it to Goleta in 1981. Reson now has offices in the U.S., Denmark, Scotland and Germany. In 1991, Reson introduced the SeaBat series of high-performance multibeam echosounders, now the industry standard.

Reson products are used for, among other things, seafloor mapping and inspection, offshore construction, and a number of defense applications, including mine counter measures and anti-submarine warfare.

Steenstrup holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen.

Mark Sylvester
Ambassador
Alias/Wavefront

In 1984, Mark Sylvester helped found Wavefront Technologies in Santa Barbara, one of the first animation software developers. Wavefront merged with Silicon Graphics and Alias Research in 1995, and Alias/Wavefront was born. The company's software has been used in films including Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace, X-Men and Stuart Little.

As ambassador for Alias/Wavefront, Sylvester works as a liaison between artists and software developers. He is a frequent author and speaker on computer animation, digital art and digital production.

Sylvester helped create ASPIRE (the After School Program for Interactive Research in Education), a non-profit that teaches computer animation to young people in Santa Barbara. In 1999, the South Coast Business and Technology Association named him Executive of the Year.

M. Peter Thomas
President and CEO
Superconductor Technologies

During Peter Thomas' three and a half years as president and CEO, Superconductor Technologies has completed the transition from a research and development firm to an operating company providing the backbone of the wireless telecommunications infrastructure.

Superconductor was founded in 1987 to develop and exploit the new technology of high temperature superconducting. The explosion of wireless created a huge market for products based on this technology, and Superconductor stepped in to provide them.

Thomas, 59, has been a general manager in the telecommunications industry for 25 years, including a stint as president and CEO of Ericsson North America. He holds a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Robert Tillman
General Manager
Ziatech, an Intel company

August 15, 2000 may well go down in San Luis Obispo history as the day the Central Coast's technology sector came of age. On that day, Intel Corp. announced its $240 million purchase of Ziatech, one of the area's flagship tech companies. Ziatech manufactures hardware, software and Internet applications and has been in business in San Luis Obispo since 1979.

Bob Tillman joined Ziatech as president in 1997, and guided the company through exceptional growth leading up to the acquisition by Intel. He oversaw the development of Ziatech's successful new line of Ketris products, which combine hardware, software and services for Internet server applications. After the purchase, Intel's management selected Tillman to lead their San Luis Obispo operations as general manager.

Tillman, 53, holds a bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master's degree from Stanford University. Prior to coming to Ziatech, he spent 25 years with Hewlett Packard, serving as a division general manager at several HP locations. 

Lou Tomasetta
President and CEO
Vitesse Semiconductor

Lou Tomasetta has been president and CEO since Camarillo-based Vitesse's inception in 1987. With a name that is French for "speed," Vitesse manufactures integrated circuits for high-bandwidth communications, and the company has taken off at lightning speed as well: Vitesse, with a market capitalization of $12.6 billion, is the largest non-biotech technology company in the Tri-Counties.

Tomasetta has over 20 years experience in managing and developing technology companies. He holds B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Harry Rabin
Senior Vice President
Miramar Systems

Harry Rabin and his brother Neal have been in the computer business for nearly 20 years. The company they founded in 1981, EDI Computer Systems, became Miramar Systems in 1989 and Harry began designing software.

Miramar's success is built on two products: PC MACLAN and Desktop DNA. With PC MACLAN, the company became one of the first in the industry to offer networking software that connected Macintosh computers and PCs. Desktop DNA is the first system migrations utility to move Windows settings, applications and files from one PC to another while maintaing the user's desktop identity, or "DNA."

Miramar's customers include Motorola, Boeing and Kinko's, and the company was among Inc. Magazine's 500 fastest growing privately held companies for 1997, 1998 and 1999.

Rabin holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from UCSB. He has designed hardware for UCSB's Institute of Environmental Stress and the UCSB Physics Lab and Engineering Department.

Edmund Richards
President
Envenergy

When energy costs skyrocketed over the summer, Edmund Richards saw a business opportunity.

In June, he founded Envengery to help companies keep their energy costs down. The company's product, the Multi-Protocol Exchange (MPX) Gateway, maps out exactly what systems in a building are using the most energy and develops plans to reduce consumption. Business owners can direct the system to adjust lighting and thermostats to keep energy costs at a prescribed level.

Richards, 47, holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical and environmental engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Karl Willig
CEO
InfoGenesis

Karl Willig began offering point-of-sale (POS) solutions through his company, InfoGenesis, in 1986. He was ahead of the competition, and he's stayed ahead.

InfoGenesis is now the leading provider of POS solutions to the hospitality industry, and since 1998 the company has offered Revelation, an open-systems POS software solution for Windows NT. InfoGenesis' clients include Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, Six Flags Theme Parks and Hilton Gaming.

Willig holds an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. He is also a Distinguished Graduate of both the Army Officers' Candidate School and the Armor Officers' School in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Stuart Wolff
Chairman and CEO
Homestore.com

Stuart Wolff was a vice president at TCI Communications when he recognized the potential of the Internet in the real estate industry. In 1996 he left TCI and founded NetSelect in Thousand Oaks, a company dedicated to managing Realtor.com, the National Association of Realtors' official Web site. Wolff later changed the name of the company to Homestore.com.

Homestore.com has become the market leader in online real estate services. Its network of sites, which includes Realtor.com, supplies products, services and information for every phase of the home life cycle: buying, selling, moving, renting, remodeling, decorating and shopping.

Earlier this year, Homestore.com announced a partnership with America Online to link AOL's 24 million subscribers to Homestore.com via AOL's new House & Home channel. On Oct. 27, Homestore.com bought Move.com, its closest competition in online home listings. Pending finalization of the deal, Homestore.com will control 90 percent of online real estate listings.

Wolff holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and a master's and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University. He has worked at some of the country's most respected research facilities, including AT&T Bell Labs, IBM and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).