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Board

Cathy Dean

Cathy graduated from Brown University and Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. She has 15 years of experience in financial services, industrial manufacturing, and high technology businesses. Most recently, Cathy worked at Oracle Corporation in product management. Over the last 14 years in San Francisco, she has taken leadership roles with the Brown Club of Northern California and the Junior League of San Francisco. Cathy also serves on the board of trustees for Gateway High School, a charter school in San Francisco.

Steve Dostart

Steve develops commercial real estate in the Palo Alto area. He founded the Dostart Development Company, LLC in 1999 after working for a Palo Alto developer, John Mozart, and the Trammell Crow family in Dallas, Texas. He was also a summer associate at Goldman, Sachs & Co. during his time at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Steve graduated from the Graduate School of Business in 1990 as an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Lance Fors

Board Chair

Lance Fors received his BA from UC-Berkeley and his PhD from the California Institute of Technology, both in molecular biology. During his graduate school years, he also assembled a large real estate portfolio that he continues to own and manage. After receiving his PhD, he founded Third Wave Technologies, a molecular diagnostic company in Madison Wisconsin. During his tenure as CEO, from 1994 through 2004, Dr. Fors led Third Wave's growth from a concept, through the research and product development phases, to a public company with a $500 million market value and $50 million in revenues. Since 2005, Dr. Fors has focused on social entrepreneurship. These activities include venture philanthropy and special needs housing. In venture philanthropy, Dr. Fors focuses on empowering promising social entrepreneurs to become powerful catalysts for change by acting as a sounding board, coach and mentor. He works with a select number of innovative organizations per year at inflection points in their development on strategy and execution issues and how to increase their social impact. He is currently Chairman of the New Teacher Center and Reading Partners, Vice-Chairman of Silicon Valley Social Ventures, Trustee of the Silicon Valley Children's Fund, and a court appointed special advocate for two foster youth. In special needs housing, Dr. Fors works collaboratively with public and private support agencies and acquires and modifies properties to enable individuals with special physical or mental needs to live independently. Dr. Fors is also a lead director and co-owner of Lance Construction Supplies, an inventor on dozens of patents, and recipient of an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Scott Ellis

Board Treasurer

Scott Ellis is the Chief Operating Officer of the New Teacher Center, a major national K-12 education nonprofit focused on supporting and mentoring new public school teachers.  Prior to that, he served as Director of Hewlett Packard's Strategic Planning and Modeling group (SPaM).  SPaM helps the HP businesses make better data-driven decisions in the areas of supply chain, forecasting and planning, warranty and related areas.  During his years at SPaM, Scott worked with many HP businesses on a wide range of complex business problems.  Before HP, Scott worked for three years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company.  He has a bachelor's degree in government and economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford.

Adam Rak

Board Secretary

Adam is the Senior Director of Public Affairs at Symantec. In this role, he has global responsibility for managing Symantec's relationships with government officials and overseeing the company's worldwide public policy agenda. In addition, he is responsible for the management of Symantec's corporate philanthropy, community relations and corporate social responsibility programs. He is a recent past Chair of the Business Software Alliance's Policy Council, which is comprised of more than 20 of the world's leading software and hardware companies. He also helped found the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, the only CEO-led public policy and advocacy group exclusively focused on cyber security issues.

Nina Simosko

As Global Chief Operating Officer for SAP's Education organization, Nina is responsible for more than half a billion euros in global software and services revenue. She is also a member of the SAP Senior Executive team. Nina has more than 14 years of sales and operations management experience with a tremendous understanding of the global high-tech industry. Prior to joining SAP in 2004, Nina worked at Siebel Systems, where she served as the General Manager of Education for the Americas and Asia-Pacific/Japan and also ran Global Support & Maintenance Sales. She joined Siebel after working at Oracle Corporation running the Global Education Sales & Marketing team. Nina is involved in a variety of industry associations including: (1) the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives, an exclusive membership organization for women in senior positions at high growth companies; (2) the Professional Area Network for Women in Technology, a Silicon Valley-based, nonprofit organization devoted to creating programs and educating professional women in technology; and (3) the Alliance of Technology and Women, an organization that encourages women and girls to enter technology fields. Nina holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Montclair State University with emphases in both Italian and History.

Perry Thorndyke

Board Vice Chair

Perry W. Thorndyke holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Computer and Information Sciences from Yale University.  After receiving his Ph.D., he worked as a researcher at The Rand Corporation and taught human cognition at UCLA.  He conducted research and published more than 40 articles in the areas of human memory and cognition, instructional techniques for optimizing learning, computer-based instruction, and artificial intelligence systems.  Subsequently, Dr. Thorndyke spent more than 20 years in technical and business management in the software industry, specializing in enterprise business applications of artificial intelligence, customer relationship management,  and e-business.  He has held executive positions in Marketing, Business Development, and information technology management at FMC Corporation, Wells Fargo Bank, Metaphor Computer Systems, and Quintus Corporation. He  built  organizations from the ground up in early-stage software companies and has managed groups as large as 150 business and software development personnel in large enterprises, all with responsibility for delivering and supporting software applications.

Most recently, he served as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at BroadVision, an internet applications company that pioneered one-to-one relationship management.  During his tenure, BroadVision grew from $1M to $400M in annual revenues, completed two public offerings, and completed 25 equity investments in emerging internet firms.  Dr. Thorndyke has served on several boards of directors for software and services companies.

Tania Wilcox

Tania is the education grant-making leader for SV2, a Silicon Valley-based venture philanthropy organization. Tania also currently serves as the Board Chair for Breakthrough San Jose, a regional branch of the Breakthrough Collaborative, a national nonprofit that increases educational opportunity for high-potential, low-income middle school students by involving college and high school students as mentors and teachers. Tania served as the Executive Director of several education nonprofits in the Bay Area and helped lead nationwide replication of the Breakthrough Collaborative program model as a former National Program Officer for the organization.