Judges
Joel Moxley
Joel is Founder of Foro Energy which is commercializing high power lasers in the oil, gas, geothermal, and mining industries. Most recently, Dr. Moxley was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at North Bridge Venture Partners where he worked with entrepreneurs to conceive, form, and grow early-stage companies in the energy and materials sectors through investments from the fund’s $2B+ in assets. Previously, Dr. Moxley was Co-Founder of PriorSmart, acquired by RPX Corporation (NASDAQ:RPXC), which leads the market in patent enforcement data for the IP litigation community and Vice President of Operations of Semprus Biosciences, acquired by Teleflex Incorporated (NYSE:TFX), that develops specialty materials for medical devices. Dr. Moxley received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and B.S.E. from Princeton University, both in Chemical Engineering.
Mahboud Zabetian
Mahboud is a software entrepreneur, consultant and investor in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the co-founder and chairman of WildPackets, Inc., and also co-founded ClearInk, Timestamp.com, Optimized.com. He’s currently working with the educational app company TinyBop, and the startups Hovee and Transcense.
Tom Connelly
Thomas M. Connelly, Jr. is the Executive Director and CEO of the American Chemical Society. Dr. Connelly retired from DuPont in December 2014, where he was Executive Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer, and a member of the company’s Office of the Chief Executive. At DuPont, he was responsible for Science & Technology and the geographic regions outside the United States, as well as Integrated Operations which includes Operations, Sourcing & Logistics and Engineering. At DuPont, Dr. Connelly led businesses and R&D organizations, while based in the US, Europe and Asia. Dr. Connelly graduated with highest honors from Princeton University with degrees in Chemical Engineering and Economics. As a Winston Churchill Scholar, he received his doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Cambridge. He is a Director of Grasim Industries, an Indian listed company. He has served in advisory roles to the U.S. Government and the Republic of Singapore.
Claire Ikeda-Thew
Claire’s fifteen year career has focused primarily on financial markets, in both traditional and entrepreneurial roles. She began her career at BlackRock Financial Management, when it had fewer than 1000 employees, working with taxable institutional clients. Following business school, she spent six years in London as a fixed income trader. She focused on UK and emerging markets inflation trading at Lehman Brothers, and then went on to found UK inflation trading desks for two other banks. Most recently, Claire left the institutional world to found Venturous Alternatives, an investment advisory firm committed to bringing higher quality alternative investments to a broader investment base. She holds an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Patrick Wack
Patrick has 25 years of experience with early stage and high-growth Companies. For the last 5 years, he has been a venture partner at Rho Capital in New York City. Prior to that, as CEO of IntraLinks (NYSE:IL), he led the Company from $20mm to over $125mm in revenue and a $450mm sale. Patrick serves as Chairman of the Board for IntraLinks. In addition, he has served as a Director for numerous SaaS/Cloud businesses within the the mobile, health care, educational, compliance and payroll industries. Prior to IntraLinks, by the age of 27, Patrick helped build an outpatient health care services company from $0 revenue to a NASDAQ-listing and eventual sale.
Pierre duPont (Coordinator of Judges)
Pierre is a Partner at HPM Partners, LLC and a Senior Client Advisor. Among other clients, he works with owners of businesses on their growth strategies, financing, liquidity, wealth management, estate planning and tax strategies. Previously, he was a placement agent on behalf of several hedge fund managers and several VCs and PE fund managers. From 2006 to 2011, Pierre was at Two Sigma Investments where he managed a private investing activity, created a project development company to build two 60MW solar power plants, developed the firm’s early investment strategy for mainland China, and raised investment capital for the firm’s flagship hedge funds. Before that Pierre was an advisor to many small and early-stage companies, and an entrepreneur, co-founding three software companies resulting in one IPO, one acquisition, and one write-off. He started his career in the early 1980s at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) as a research scientist and software engineer in computational linguistics, parallel processing, and statistical data analysis.