Executive Team

Mark Cramer, CEO, has more than 14 years of technology industry experience, from engineer to executive. At Hewlett-Packard in Grenoble, France, he was a Project Manager in charge of international manufacturing and distribution for PC-workstation product lines. Mark was one of the early employees at Keynote Systems, where he successfully incubated and launched their professional services practice. He was later hired as CEO of NetGeo, where he developed the early business plan, brought the first product to market and raised capital from existing and new investors. Mark went on to NexTag, a vertical search engine, where he directed the launch of the mortgage category. Mark earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, where one of his projects included developing a search engine from scratch, and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Mike Wertheim, Chief Architect, has 18 years of experience in software development in both large corporate environments and small startups. He gained expertise in software development by working with relational databases for nine years as an engineer at Sybase. Mike went on to spend three years working at Linkify, where he was the Chief Architect of an innovative, high-performance content management and project collaboration system. Mike also contributed as a content reviewer on the book "Bitter EJB," which was published by Manning Publications in 2003. Mike has a BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

David Hardtke, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, worked for 13 years in experimental particle, nuclear and astrophysics. He has conducted experiments at CERN, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Brookhaven National Lab and at the South Pole Station. Immediately prior to joining Surf Canyon, he was research scientist and lecturer in the physics department at UC Berkeley. David specializes in searches for very rare patterns hidden in enormous (many terabyte) data sets using advanced automated statistical data mining techniques. He is the author of over 70 papers in referenced journals. David holds a B.S. from Duke and earned his Ph.D. in Particle Physics from Ohio State in a remarkable three years.

Advisors

Bryan Finkel, Managing Director of Greenwich Venture Management, has over 25 years of investment banking and operational consulting experience in the information technology and financial services sectors. Recent client engagements include the development of lead generation and call center analytics for a major student loan consolidator and the design of a multi-retailer loyalty incentive program for a $20 billion oil company. Prior to GVM, Bryan ran two venture funds for Advanta (Nasdaq: ADVNB), where he reported to the Office of the Chairman. Earlier in his career he was a Senior Associate at Broadview Associates where he participated in the valuation and sale of Iris Associates (creator of Lotus Notes!) and the venture round for Checkpoint Technologies (Nasdaq: CKPT). Prior to Broadview he founded a manufacturer of scientific computing products for movie special effects and communications. Bryan earned his MS and BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and his MBA from Stanford. He recently stepped down after ten years as Chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum of NYC and continues to advise a wide variety of private companies.

Sam Shank, Founder of TravelPost, was formerly responsible for distribution partnerships at SideStep.com, as well as the general management of TravelPost.com, SideStep's travel and hotel reviews community and user-generated content platform. Sam founded TravelPost.com in 2004 and was CEO until the company's acquisition in October, 2006. Prior to starting TravelPost.com, Sam spent 10 years in the consumer Internet industry including leadership roles in business development and product management at NexTag, Excite, CNET, and Oracle. At NexTag, Sam launched and managed the Electronics and Small Sellers categories. Sam holds a Masters in Business Administration from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management, where he received the Entrepreneurial Studies award and a BA in English from the University of Virginia.

Erik Freed, Principal of CoDecision, has been active in the computer industry for over two decades, comfortably switching between multitudes of demanding roles. He has at various times been a hardware/software engineer, architect, consultant, writer, manager, executive, board member, spokesman, and founder. He is currently the principal at CoDecision, specializing in CTO level consulting to startups. Erik studied Math, Physics and Music at Yale University.

Perry Gregg, CEO of UShow2, is on the Board of Advisors for the Taproot Foundation and is a Board member of the non-profit WOMAN, Inc. He is emeritus VP, Board of Directors at the Harvard Club of the Bay Area. A staff employee for the Hearst Corporation and the San Francisco Chronicle, he was the recipient of an Exemplary Leadership Award in 2004. Before joining the Chronicle, Perry held several management positions including Director of Software at NeXT Computer; Director of Software at Radius, a hardware peripheral company; Engineering Manager in Apple's Developer Services Group; and Engineering Manager of Application Frameworks at Apple. A Chairperson interviewer for Harvard College, Perry holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of California, Davis. He was President of his law school class. Perry is founder of the Harvard Technology Forum.