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Board and Advisors

Board Members

Nickhil Jakatdar; CEO & Co-Founder

Prior to Vuclip, Nickhil was the President and COO of Praesagus, a MIT incubated start-up that he helped grow to becoming the most widely used design-to-manufacturing modeling software in its class, before its acquisition by Cadence Design Systems. Post-acquisition, Nickhil became Engineering Group Director at Cadence where he ran the entire Manufacturing Modeling Group. Prior to Praesagus, Nickhil helped found and served on the board of directors of CommandCAD, an electrical CAD company that was acquired two years after its founding. Prior to CommandCAD, Nickhil co-founded Timbre Technologies, a semiconductor manufacturing start-up, that won the first-ever Berkeley Business Plan competition, leading to a successful venture-backed financing. Nickhil served as CTO and VP of Marketing and Products as the company grew to become the industry standard in the field of scatterometry, before being acquired by Tokyo Electron Ltd. Nickhil remained at TEL for 3 years as Sr. Director of Technology and Marketing.

Nickhil received his M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has been the recipient of many awards from various organizations, including the IEEE Best Paper Award in the area of Transactions in Semiconductor Manufacturing for 2001, the Berkeley Distinguished Pioneer Award, the NSF and MICRO fellowships and the Most Outstanding Student award at the College of Engineering, Pune. He has been featured in several articles published in the United States and in India. He has to his credit more than 20 conference papers and more than 30 patents.

Zhigang Chen; CTO, VP of Engineering & Co-Founder

Zhigang is responsible for Vuclip's technology direction and engineering operations. He co-founded XinLab in 2004 to bring Internet multimedia applications to mobile devices. Zhigang has over 15 years of experience in research and development of Internet and mobile multimedia. While working toward his doctorate in 1995 at the University of Illinois, Zhigang co-founded the first Web-based video streaming company, Vosaic. After Vosaic was acquired by VTEL in 1999, he served as Principal Engineer at VTEL to oversee the technology transition between the two companies. Zhigang became an independent consultant after VTEL. He was responsible for the engineering development for Caw Network's (acquired by Spirent) award-winning streaming media testing product line.

Zhigang received his BS and MS degree in computer science from Tianjin University in China and University of Louisiana at Lafayette, respectively. He earned a PhD in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research papers have appeared in publications such as IEEE Transaction on Computers and World Wide Web Journal. He is the co-author of a widely referenced paper in streaming media on the Web that received the best paper award in 1995 at the Fourth International Conference on the World Wide Web.

Krishna 'Kittu' Kolluri; General Partner, New Enterprise Associates

Krishna 'Kittu' Kolluri joined New Enterprise Associates in January 2006 as a General Partner, and focuses on information technology investments. He serves on the boards of RingCube Technologies, SnapTell, Teracent, Weatherbill, Novatium, Oanda, Plusmo and Vuclip. He was previously on the board of PortAuthority Technologies (NASDAQ: WBSN). Prior to NEA, Kolluri served as the Executive Vice President and General Manager for the Security Products Group at Juniper Networks, as a result of NetScreen's acquisition by Juniper Networks in April 2004. Mr. Kolluri was responsible for the secure router, firewall, VPN, secure access and intrusion detection and prevention products.

Prior to that, Kolluri served briefly as the GM of NetScreen's Secure Access Products, as a result of NetScreen's acquisition of Neoteris, Inc. in November 2003. Prior to that, he served for more than two and a half years as President and CEO of Neoteris, the leader of SSL-based Application Security Gateway market. Under Kolluri's leadership, Neoteris excelled and grew considerably, passing multiple corporate and product milestones. Despite the general freeze on technology spending at the time, Neoteris attracted customers and partners at an unprecedented rate. Kolluri built a company respected as much for its stellar team, fiscal management, and culture, as for its category creation and leading SSL-based access technology.

Prior to Neoteris, Kolluri co-founded Healtheon/WebMD, where he managed engineering for the company in its early days, later moving through key operational and business development roles as the company grew. His last role before joining Neoteris was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Provider Services. Prior to Healtheon/WebMD, Kolluri worked at Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) where he initially managed developer products, later moving into management of high profile Interactive TV projects.

Kolluri's educational background includes a B.Tech. (M.E.) from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, and an M.S. in Operations Research from SUNY, Buffalo, NY. Kolluri was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT, Madras in 2005, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award by SUNY, Buffalo in 2007. He is a Charter Member of TiE. Kolluri is married with two children. His hobbies include golf, photography, and music.

Nick Sturiale; General Partner, Jafco Ventures

Nick Sturiale joined Jafco Ventures in 2009, bringing over twenty years of experience in the technology industry both as a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur. He has been with three start-ups in product and marketing roles and has developed great insights regarding how best to scale early-stage companies with limited resources. As a venture investor, he has guided and financed, from the seed stage, several significant companies.

Life Before Jafco

Nick's venture capital career began with Sevin Rosen Funds, a leading venture capital fund, where he spent nearly ten years, including eight as a General Partner. At Sevin Rosen, he developed exceptional skills as an active seed and early-stage investor. He then joined The Carlyle Group as a Managing Director and co-head of its Silicon Valley office focused on technology investing. Prior to his venture experience, Nick spent twelve years as an entrepreneur and operating executive leading all facets of product management, business development and marketing in venture-backed start-ups. He was founding CEO of Timbre Technologies (acquired by Tokyo Electron for $138 million) and held senior management roles with Quorum Software and Candescent Technologies.

Investment Experience

At Jafco, Nick is on the Board of or is actively involved with Groundwork Open Source, RedSeal Systems, SocialVibe and Vuclip. Nick was also instrumental in the sale of Quellan (Intersil) and Solidcore Systems (McAfee).

Nick's past investments include XenSource (Citrix Systems), which was acquired for $500 million. He also serves on the Board of Splunk and YouSendIt, two currently active prior investments.

Education

Nick holds a Bachelor of Science degree from California State University, Chico and an MBA with distinction from the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a frequent guest lecturer.