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Bill Gross is a lifelong entrepreneur and proponent of solar power. While still in college, Mr. Gross founded Solar Devices, a firm that sold plans and kits for solar energy products. As the CEO of the technology incubator Idealab, Mr. Gross has founded several extremely successful companies, including Overture (acquired by Yahoo!), CarsDirect, and Picasa (acquired by Google). Idealab recently moved into the renewable energy market with Energy Innovations, a sister company to eSolar that focuses on the retail rooftop solar market. Mr. Gross sits on the Board of Directors of the California Institute of Technology, where he obtained his BS in Mechanical Engineering.
Bandel L. Carano joined Oak as a General Partner in 1985. Mr. Carano has invested in companies with emphasis on Wireless and Rich-Media communications (2Wire, Airspan, Avici, CommVerge, CoreTek, Endwave, FiberTower, General Bandwidth, MobiTV, NeoPhotonics, Netopia, PictureTel, Plastic Logic, Polycom, Presdio, PulsePoint, Qtera, Sentient Networks, Tegic, Trapeze, Wellfleet and WFI); Advanced Software Systems (Entropic, firstRain, Illustra/Informix, Sybase, Tele Atlas and Visto); Advanced Semiconductors (Actel, Airgo, CommQuest, Kenet, Level 5, NemeriX, Newport Media, nLight, Qpixel, Resonext, SMIC, Solarflare, Stretch, Synaptics and Virata); Design Automation (Centric Software, Interconnectix, Parametric, Synopsys and Tensilica) and Clean Energy Technologies (eSolar, PML and Relion). Prior to Oak, Mr. Carano joined Morgan Stanley's Venture Capital Group in 1983. He was responsible for advising Morgan Stanley on high-tech new business development, as well as sponsoring venture investments. Mr. Carano received BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He currently serves on the Investment Advisory Board of the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund.
Brian L. Hinman joined Oak as a Venture Partner in 2006. Mr. Hinman is the co-founder, and formerly the President and CEO, of 2Wire, a provider of broadband service platforms for the DSL market. Mr. Hinman is also the co-founder, and formerly the CEO, of Polycom, Inc., (NASDAQ: PLCM) the world's leading teleconferencing company. Mr. Hinman was the co-founder of PictureTel Corporation (formerly NASDAQ: PCTL) at the age of 22, pioneering the video compression technology that has endured into the standards of today. Mr. Hinman is an engineer by training, a specialist in digital signal processing, and holds twelve U.S. patents. He has received several awards for entrepreneurship, including being named an Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young in 2005. To catalyze entrepreneurship at his alma mater, he sponsors the Hinman CEO (Campus Entrepreneurship Opportunities) Program at the University of Maryland. Mr. Hinman currently serves on the board of directors of three Oak portfolio companies, Aurora Biofuels, Qpixel Technology and 2Wire. He has previously served on the national board of the American Electronic Association, and was co-founder and director of the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC). Mr. Hinman holds a B.S.E.E. Summa Cum Laude from the University of Maryland, and an S.M.E.E. from M.I.T.
Marcia Goodstein founded Idealab with Bill Gross in March 1996 and since that time has been instrumental in the creation and development of dozens of Idealab network companies in industries ranging from clean technologies and robotics to search technologies and Internet retail. Today Ms. Goodstein serves as Idealab's Chief Operating Officer and President and currently serves on the boards of numerous companies including EI Solutions, Evolution Robotics, Evolution Robotics Retail, Perfect Market, Snap Technologies, X1 Technologies and Internet Brands. Prior to founding Idealab, Ms. Goodstein worked at several start-up companies and was an early employee of Gemstar Development Corporation responsible for media licensing for North America, as well as marketing and distribution in South America. Prior to joining Gemstar, Ms. Goodstein worked in a biology lab at the California Institute of Technology. She is a graduate of Pomona College.
A technical entrepreneur for over 20 years, Asif Ansari has founded over a dozen successful companies in aerospace, alternative transportation, engineering & manufacturing, and global retail. He has led the development & commercialization of over 20 technical products in the clean tech and aerospace markets, including a solar desalination micro-turbine generator. Mr. Ansari founded Omni Systems, where he led the design of NASA's Lunar Prospector Spacecraft, a lunar resource mapping mission that was successfully launched in 1998. He is a strong and long-term proponent of solar energy. Most recently, he spent three years as the EVP of Engineering and Manufacturing at Energy Innovations, where he led the engineering development of a heliostat-based concentrated PV product. He has a wide ranging engineering and research background with several landmark publications in the field of heat transfer. He holds a BSME and an MSME from the University of Minnesota.
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