Please join us on October 23, 2008 as the Silicon Flatirons Center presents Todd Vernon, CEO and Walter Knapp, COO of Lijit as our featured entrepreneurs in our Entrepreneurs Unplugged series. Mr. Vernon and Mr. Knapp, leading Colorado entrepreneurs, have a wide breadth of experience on the business and technical sides of creating start-ups.
Entrepreneurs Unplugged is a meeting place where faculty, students and community members with technical backgrounds learn about and get involved in entrepreneurship. In particular, the program offers students and faculty an opportunity to learn how a successful start up is created as well as an opportunity to network. Each Entrepreneurs Unplugged meeting features food, drink and – most importantly – an experienced entrepreneur to discuss his/her start-up experiences.
Todd Vernon
CEO Lijit Networks
Todd is the CEO of Lijit Networks which he helped found in 2006. Lijit’s mission is to provide super cool services to online publishers of all sizes that help them understand their readers better and create a business around their passion. Prior to Lijit, Todd was the CTO, Co-founder, and Chief System Architect of Raindance Communications which built and operated web conferencing services to businesses and consumers. Todd designed and built a global multimedia architecture for web conferencing that helped grow the company from startup to publicly traded company with annual revenues in excess of $80M. Todd enjoys everything about the startup process and is an avid blogger about life, multimedia, and his startup experiences.
Walter Knapp
COO Lijit Networks
Walter is currently the COO at Lijit Networks where he is responsible for all aspects of operations including marketing, business development, finance, engineering, and HR. Prior to this, Walter led the SuSE Linux field organization in the Americas for Novell where he grew the business from less than $2M in annual revenue to over $37M in less than three years. Walter was an investment partner at Novell Technology Capital, and previously was an investment manager at Cambridge Technology Capital, two very successful venture capital firms. Prior to this he was the National Director for NewCo Solutions at Cambridge Technology Partners, a division he founded that worked to launch, start-up and spin-off companies out of larger organizations.
Earlier in his career Walter served as the Interactive Solutions Market Lead for Cambridge Technology Partners in the Rocky Mountain region. While in graduate school he co-founded DCN a developer of Internet appliances and software solutions for live imaging. He was a Research Analyst for Online Network Enterprises, Inc. and held sales and marketing positions with MPC, Inc. and Collagen Biomedical, Inc.
Walter has a BA in History from Boston College and a ME in Telecommunications from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Walter managed Novell Ventures and Cambridge Technology Capital investments in the following companies: Arcot, Alphablox, Ayeca, CollabNET, Evergreen, NetPro, Netvision, Newmoon, Plumtree, Oblix, and Zaplet.