Management Team / Advisory Board Bios
Rick Bentley - Founder, Chief Executive Officer
Rick Bentley has over 20 years of Silicon Valley startup and technology experience. He was founder and CEO of Televoke Inc. (became deCarta, bought by Uber) where he raised eight figures of Venture Capital from VC’s including Softbank and WI Harper. Mr. Bentley has been a full time Advisor to Google X. He was a direct report to Andy Grove for half a decade. Investors have brought him in for interim-CEO roles at early stage companies. He was a Senior Consultant at Bearing Point Inc., which included two assignments in Baghdad. At General Magic he managed the “Portico” program, derivatives of which served over a million subscribers. He was Director of Business Development for Machina, a design and engineering house that developed consumer electronics products, some of which sold over 10MM units. He was also Director of Product Development for Sensory Inc, which at one point had the largest installed base of speech recognition systems in the world. Mr. Bentley is the author of multiple patents and patent filings, many of which were bought by Samsung in 2014. He received his BA in Physics and MS in Engineering from UC Berkeley.
Gregory Rayzman - Technology Advisor
Seasoned technologist and well recognized name in Silicon Valley. His expertise in Big Data and database architecture is sought by several emerging and well established companies like Apple, where he provided pivotal leadership in designing and developing massively scalable and database backed infrastructures. Most recently, Mr. Rayzman had a great stint at TheFind shopping search engine with relevancy and popularity algorithm instead of the ordinary pay-for-placement. TheFind was acquired by Facebook in 2015. Prior to that, as Chief architect of a forward-looking company NebuAd, in 2007 he developed behavior targeting advertising systems based on the aggregate data, which everyone from Google and Yahoo to Facebook and Plaxo is looking into only now – for better targeted, more relevant advertising. He was previously a founding engineer and Chief architect for ITM Software, acquired by BMC. Mr. Rayzman also served as CTO for Claridyne Inc., an IT infrastructure and integration company. Mr. Rayzman was founding engineer and Director of Software Engineering for Annuncio Inc., acquired by PeopleSoft (now Oracle).
Craig Johnson - Vice President, Sales
Over 20 years of experience in a variety of Sales, Sales Management, Marketing, Operations, and General Management positions with his last assignment being COO of a digital signage startup. Prior to that he was a Honeywell General Manager, running a 100+ person organization with $27m in revenues, that consulted, sold, installed, and maintained HVAC systems, Fire Alarm, and Security systems in large, commercial buildings. Mr. Johnson also has extensive experience in the marketing and sales of electronic components to OEM and Distributor channels, both through direct salesforces and independent rep organizations. At the customer enterprise level, Mr. Johnson managed the sales and service teams for process automation platforms that monitor and control refineries, power generation plants, and manufacturing sites. He is Six Sigma certified and served as a Reserve Officer in the Armed Forces.
