Dan Avida

Partner, Opus Capital

With 16 years experience building successful companies and guiding them through to profitable outcomes, Dan Avida brings a strong operating background to Opus Capital.

Dan is interested in working with innovative entrepreneurs in the US and Israel developing systems, cloud and enterprise infrastructure and applications, solutions for the post-PC world, security, and next generation collaboration platforms.

Most recently, Dan was President and CEO of Decru Inc., a pioneering storage security company that Dan co-founded in 2001. Decru was acquired for $272.5M by Network Appliance (NASDAQ: NTAP) in 2005.

In 1989, Dan was a founding member of Electronics for Imaging (NASDAQ: EFII), which received its only round of venture funding from Weiss, Peck & Greer Venture Partners, in 1992. Initially, Dan led the Fiery project—the cornerstone of EFI’s success. He went on to be promoted several times, ultimately to Chairman and CEO. Under Dan’s leadership, EFI experienced five years of dramatic, consecutive growth, placing the company on Business Week, Fortune and Forbes lists of fastest growing companies, and on the Nasdaq 100 index.

Dan served as an officer in the Israel Defense Force during the years 1984-1989. He holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, where he graduated summa cum laude. Dan has five granted patents.

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart