Timothy C. Draper is the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. His original suggestion to use "viral marketing" in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and YahooMail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses. On behalf of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tim serves on the boards of Glam, Tagworld, Socialtext, Kyte.tv, Chroma Graphics, Meebo, Increo, and Wigix. Previous successes include: Skype (EBAY), Overture.com (YHOO), Baidu (BIDU), Parametric Technology (PMTC), Hotmail (MSFT), PLX Technologies (PLXT), Preview Travel (TVLY), Digidesign (AVID), and others.
Tim launched the DFJ Global Network, an international network of early-stage venture capital funds with offices in over 30 cities around the globe. He founded or co-founded DFJ ePlanet (global), Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham (NYC), Zone Ventures (LA), Epic Ventures (Salt Lake City), Draper Atlantic (Reston), Draper Triangle (Pittsburg), Timberline Ventures (Portland), Polaris Fund (Anchorage), DFJ Frontier (Sacramento and Santa Barbara), and DFJ DragonFund (Shanghai).
Julie Hanna is Chair of the Board at Kiva, Advisory Board Chair at Actuate Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTU) and a recent advisor to Web 2.0 start-up Plum (acquired by Nokia NYSE: NOK). Previously, Julie has been an entrepreneur, CEO and founding executive to several successful consumer internet and business software startups: Scalix, a pioneer and a global leader in open source software; onebox.com (acquired by phone.com now OpenWave, Nasdaq: OPWV), where she and her team brought to market the fastest growing internet communications service in 1999; Portola, where she was instrumental to the acquisition by Netscape; 2Bridge, where she coined the term "enterprise portal" and championed the creation of a new software category, and Healtheon (now WebMD, Nasdaq: WBMD).
Eugene Lee is the Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors at Socialtext. Lee assumes day-to-day management and operational control over all aspects of Socialtext's business, including driving product direction and development, strategic alliances, and scaling the sales, marketing and support organizations globally.
Lee comes to Socialtext from Adobe Systems, where he led Adobe’s enterprise marketing and vertical market segments. Previously, he held several executive leadership roles at Cisco Systems, ranging from Vice President (VP) Worldwide Small/Medium Business Marketing to VP Worldwide Enterprise Marketing. Lee also held key management positions at Banyan Systems, including General Manager for the messaging business unit. He was co-founder of Beyond Inc., developers of the award-winning BeyondMail product, and holds four patents in messaging, workflow and privacy technologies. Lee has a B.A. in Physics and B.S. in Engineering and Computer Science from Harvard College and an MBA from M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.
Ross Mayfield is Chairman, President & Co-founder of Socialtext. Prior to Socialtext, Mayfield served as VP of Marketing for a Fujitsu spinout and CEO of an enterprise risk management software company. Mayfield co-founded and served as president of RateXchange (AMEX:RTX), the leading B2B commodity exchange for telecom. Mayfield served as the marketing director of the largest privately held telecommunications group in Eastern Europe and was the internal lead manager of their Initial Public Offering. He also founded an ISP, a web-design company, and has served on a number of Advisory Boards of high tech startups.
Mayfield is a former advisor to the Office of the President of Estonia and began his career in the non-profit sector. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program of the Anderson School of Business. A noted blogger and industry expert, Mayfield is a serial and social entrepreneur. He blogs at http://ross.typepad.com
This paper will help you choose a social software solution that produces the greatest benefits for your company. It outlines the 5 requirements most critical to the success of social software in business. A solution will be successful to the degree it meets these 5 critical requirements.