WHEN
March 26, 2007
WHAT
Building great companies take skill, experience and luck. Dan Avida led EFI through years of fast growth and with Serge Plotkin, a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, co-founded Decru, which was later acquired by Network Appliance.
Dan and Serge will talk about their experiences and discuss the key steps of building successful companies, from inception and funding to a successful exit.
WHO
Dan Avida is a General Partner at Opus Capital, an early stage venture capital firm.
Prior to Opus Capital, 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.
Serge Plotkin is a venture partner for Opus Capital, where he sources and evaluates investment opportunities and contributes technical assistance to portfolio companies. Serge is also an associate professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he has served since 1989.
Together with Opus Capital General Partner Dan Avida, Serge co-founded Decru in 2001 where he served as chief technology officer and vice president of engineering. Serge has published more than a hundred technical papers and has been issued seven patents. He is currently the vice chair of the Security in Storage Workgroup P1619/P1619.1, IEEE standardization committee, which is tasked with creating a standard for storage encryption, and is the editor of the IEEE1619 standard.
Serge obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT and BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from Ben Gurion University, Israel. Before his studies at MIT, Serge served for five years as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces.