David William Baum is an experienced venture capital general partner with twenty one years in the information technology industry, including twelve years in technology finance and nine years in entrepreneurial operating management roles. show complete bio
As an operating entrepreneur, David founded two companies including Pensoft Corporation, a venture-backed (Mohr, Davidow Ventures, IVP, and Bay Partners) mobile communications company that was sold to AT&T in 1994. David served as VP of Engineering at Pensoft for over four years. David was a key principal that raised, launched, staffed, and managed Prism Venture Partners, a leading early stage venture capital fund. Founded in 1996, Prism has provided start-up equity to more than eighty-five companies, which have completed four public offerings and twenty five strategic mergers and acquisitions. During his tenure at Prism, the firm grew from zero to over $1.25B under management. Previous investments include Network24 Communications (sold to Akamai), DotBank (sold to Yahoo), Altaworks (sold to Opnet), Integral Access (sold to Telco Systems), Syncra Systems (sold to Retek), Softricity (sold to Microsoft), Salesnet (sold to RightNow) and Bitfone (sold to HP).
After leaving Prism, David founded CCVentures, a stage-agnostic operational consulting business. At CCVentures, David assisted private companies in business plan development, governance issues, financing strategies, and go-to-market campaigns. Investments and clients include: Carbonite, OnePin, Intouch Systems, mVisible, Nimbit, H2Index, Skyhook Wireless and WorldWinner.
In January of 2006, CCVentures merged with Ametron to form Stage 1 Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm. New investments include 800-411-INFO, Mophap, Gaterocket, Cuesol, Magnify Media, and AgileCo.
David holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School with second year honors and BS in Computer Science from Drexel University where he graduated first in his science class.
David’s investment areas of focus are: mobile applications and systems, internet applications, content and gaming, IPTV, virtualization, local merchant search, on-demand enterprise software and data communications equipment. David is a member of the CommonAngels and the MIT Enterprise Forum.
Jonathan Gordon, Partner
Jonathan Gordon has been a successful executive, entrepreneur and investor for over 30 years. He has been at the forefront of many historic market and technology changes in the high tech global economy. show complete bio
Mr. Gordon is the founder of Ametron Technologies, Inc., a consulting and licensing firm that helps entrepreneurs and technologists with business development and monetizing their Intellectual Property and inventions. Recent clients have included Picassa/Lifescape (sold to Google), a photo management tool; Corestreet, a provider of security software; Liquid Machines,a provider of enterprise rights management technology and solutions and Bitzmart/ Stealth Media Labs, a technology used to embed information into digital audio and video streams with playback through Windows Media Player 9 Series.
Before Ametron, Mr. Gordon was CEO of mGen, Inc., an e-learning enterprise software company, which was focused on 1st Responder market opportunities within DOD and other government agencies, such as the Navy/Marine Intranet, US Dept. of Agriculture and the US Army.
Prior to that, he was CEO and founder of EndPoints, Inc.(sold to Flextronics and Archi-tech, Taiwan) , a fabless semiconductor company, whose imaging chips powered high volume, low cost consumer digital cameras. Preceding EndPoints, Mr. Gordon was President of DiagSoft (sold to Sykes Enterprises), a PC hardware diagnostic and manufacturing test company.
Subsequent to EndPoints, Mr. Gordon was the founder of Phoenix Publishing (sold to Softbank). Mr. Gordon was also President of Paterson Labs, which he sold to Phoenix Technologies Inc. for Paterson’ s founder, Tim Paterson (the author of the MS-DOS operating system).
Mr. Gordon has built international sales and marketing organizations for several notable companies like Phoenix Technologies, who he assisted in their IPO as their first VP of Sales. Additionally, he was VP of Sales of Graphic Software Systems, an early PC software pioneer who had graphic software on the original IBM XT and AT.
Jonathan’s early sales and marketing career included Physical Data Inc. (sold to Honeywell), a start up instrumentation company, who made digital waveform recorders for use in fusion reactor and munitions testing. He also was a sales engineer with Tektronix and helped introduce the first low cost graphic terminals for mini and mainframe computing.
Mr. Gordon attended the University of Wisconsin and Penn Morton College.
Early stage venture capital is hard work - It takes more than just a group of managing partners to make a firm successful and to give it a global reach. The Managing Partners at Stage 1 Ventures have tapped their vast database of contacts to establish an active Advisory Board that provides leverage in many areas, including deal flow, due diligence, business development, industry trends, sales & marketing, international distribution, later stage fund raising, recruiting, banking, corporate operations & governance, intellectual property, research and development, education and legal.
Stage 1 Ventures is honored to have the following industry leaders / luminaries as Advisory Board members.
David William Baum, Partner
Jonathan Gordon, Partner