We are a non-profit established in 2003 with the mission of providing networking and educational programs to the business leaders of our local software community. Our volunteer Board of Directors is comprised of distinguished business leaders of the local software community. They are a great resource to us as a sounding board, for new ideas, and for governance matters. We promise the best local programs you'll find about the business of software. Our members have been kind enough to tell us that repeatedly!
Richard Bass - President/Executive Director
Principal, Executive Software Connections
Richard is the founder of the Boulder and Denver Software Clubs. In the past 10 years, he has grown the clubs to over one hundred fifty members. Bass also runs Executive Software Connections, a referral networking and recruiting business that focuses on both business (e.g. finance and marketing) and technical placements in the software industry.
Jim Anderson - Treasurer
CPA, CMA, Principal, Outlook Consulting Services
Jim provides interim CFO services for businesses of all shapes, sizes and colors. He has worked with many local technology companies. Anderson is a former Senior Controller at Texas Instruments.
David Fredericks
Senior Director of Oracle/Crystal Ball
David is a seasoned software sales and services executive who has also directed the marketing and operations groups while establishing Oracle's first two European subsidiaries. Fredericks joined Decisioneering in 1998 to create a training and consulting group after completing his MBA. Prior to completing his MBA he worked for Baker Hughes as a senior engineer evaluating petroleum reserves and exploration.
Chris Onan
Managing Director, Appian Ventures
Chris has over a decade of venture capital experience and thoroughly enjoys the challenges and rewards of helping early stage entrepreneurs navigate their companies to growth. Currently, he represents Appian on the board of directors of mPayGateway, Skyetek, and Tendril and is a board observer of Thought Equity Motion. Formerly, Onan served on the board of directors of Auctionpay, Inc. and Waukee Engineering, Inc., and was a partner at Wolf Ventures. Onan also serves as Chairman for the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association; is a member of the Associates Board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Colorado; and serves on the Advisory Board of the Denver Venture School. He is also Northwestern University's alumni admissions council leader for Colorado.
Ben Miller
Principal - Valuation Group, Clifton Gunderson, LLP
Ben is an Accredited Senior Appraiser in Business Valuation with the American Society of Appraisers and is a member of the ASA's International Board of Examiners. He has 20 years of experience in providing business valuation services for financial reporting, litigation, ESOP, merger and acquisition, tax, and management planning purposes. His clients include Flextronics, Corporate Express, Crocs, MacDermid, Red Hawk Industries, PRB Transportation, the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and numerous attorneys. Ben has extensive experience working with third-party valuation reviewers, including auditors, other valuation professionals, SEC examiners, assessors, and Federal tax reviewers.
Pete Kinsella
Partner, Perkins & Coie LLP
Peter is a partner in the firm's Licensing and Technology and Intellectual Property Practice groups. His practice is focused on advising start-up, emerging and large companies on intellectual property, technology, licensing and transaction matters. Prior to joining the firm in 2010, Pete was a partner with Faegre & Benson. Prior to that, he worked in various legal capacities with Qwest Communications International, Inc. (formerly U S WEST, Inc.) in Denver and Honeywell, Inc. in Minneapolis.
Connell Saltzman
Former CFO, Vericept
Connell has served multiple companies as CEO, CFO, and COO over the past 25 years in a variety of industry sectors for public corporations, venture backed, privately held enterprises and non-for-profit organizations. Saltzman began his career as an auditor for a Big Four accounting firm. Soon after, he entered the private industry where he began working with startup companies and raised initial seed rounds and subsequent interim rounds of capital ranging from $1 million to $20 million each. Saltzman also has substantial experience in the acquisition, negotiation, deal structuring, spinouts onto the NYSE, and the sale and operational integration of businesses from $10 million to $325 million in revenues. He has sold companies such as SafeRent, a private equity backed company, to First American Corporation, the largest title insurance company in the USA.
Brett Schklar
President and CMO, The Market Creation Group
As Chief Marketing Officer and founder of The Market Creation Group, Brett has helped over 50 companies with guiding their way with outflanking competitors, creating new products and markets as well as showing that marketing, when done right, drives sales, not just leads. Leveraging marketing strategy as a guidepost to drive all tactics, brett uses his knack for marketing and an unparalleled passion for technology, Brett launched MCG in 2006 to create a business-to-business (B2B) marketing agency that has been celebrated for its continual innovation in providing in-depth marketing strategy, marketing automation, sales tactics, project management and demand generation in the B2B technology realm. As a small business owner and entrepreneur at heart, Brett's leadership achievements at MCG have been recognized by recent awards including a two-time winning position in The Fastest Growing Private Company 2009 & 2010, recipient of the Denver Business Journal's Forty under 40 in 2010 (nominated in 2009 & 2008), a feature on him in Entrepreneur Magazine in December of 2009.
Daniel Hawtof
VP Product Management, InfoNow
Dan has 18 years experience defining services, growing sales, increasing profits and capturing market share in the highly competitive electronics industry. Skilled in the design and execution of effective strategic plans with a history of consistently outperforming corporate financial objectives. He now provides these skills to InfoNow, a software company that provides Channel Performance Optimization (CPO) software to the high tech industry.
Dan King
CEO, ReadyTalk
Dan is a Co-Founder and CEO of ReadyTalk. ReadyTalk provides audio and web conferencing solutions to over a thousand business, non profit and government customers. They recently ranked 3rd on Deloitte's CO Fast 50 technology list (#102nd nationally) and were recognized as the Best Small/Medium Company to Work For by the CO Society of Human Resource Management Dan chose to be an entrepreneur because he desired the experience of working in a company with great people and one that he could be really proud of, and building it from scratch seemed the most likely way to achieve this. He has nearly twenty years of business experience. Prior to ReadyTalk, He held senior positions in business development and financial management for ICG Communications, a Denver-based competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) servicing Internet Service Providers and businesses.
Jim Franklin
CEO, SendGrid
Jim recently joined SendGrid as CEO. Previously he was CEO of Decisioneering, Inc., Jim built the team that took the Crystal Ball software product to market ultimately resulting in the sale of the company to Hyperion/Oracle. Prior to Decisioneering, Jim had been a founder at webfamilies.com, CFO at Vericept and had served as GC, CFO and VP of Sales at Decisioneering. Jim serves on the Board of aWhere, Inc., a location intelligence software company based in Golden, CO. Jim also serves on the board of the Rockies Venture Club and is a significant contributor to the Founders Institute in Denver.