SVOD – Silicon Valley Open Doors

Impact Through High-Tech Entrepreneurship

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Speakers

Michael Herne

Michael Herne

Michael Herne

Director of Engineering, Cisco Systems

Michael Herne is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in building and managing technology companies. Michael is currently Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems in the Security Technology Group. This followed the acquisition by Cisco of his most recent company M.I Secure founded in 2004. Prior to this he was the Chief Security Officer for F5 Networks which followed the acquisition by F5 of uRoam, Inc. which he co-founded in 1998 as the CEO. uRoam pioneered the SSL VPN space. Prior to this Michael held senior management positions in the disk drive media business at StorMedia and Nashua Computer Products. He is a graduate of the New Hampshire Technical College, where he studied Computer Science.

Testimonials

I am delighted to participate in and sponsor SVOD. It is particularly gratifying at this stage of my professional career to be able to support this unique organization and give back to the high-tech community. Looking back, I regret not having the benefits of SVOD network early on, when I really needed it! It is wonderful to see the new startups taking advantage of this very special forum.

Mike Sandler

CEO of Epiphan

The SVOD conference was a wonderful event. 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

The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries. I felt very comfortable at SVOD and recognized its participants as having the same type of DNA that made Silicon Valley what it is today.

Ron Conway

SV Angel

Great conference, interesting presentations and most important, relevant participants with concrete ideas and tremendous willingness to mentor and help startups.

Adi Bittan

Founder & CEO, OwnerListens & Stanford MBA

It’s a great conference and it brings together great content from really terrific speakers like we just had and then a network of really interesting entrepreneurs.

Andy Tsao

Managing Director, Silicon Valley Bank

The founders of the conference are very authentic and these are people that want to change the world and make things better for entrepreneurs and help people and I think that’s a great thing.

George Zachary

Partner, Charles River Ventures, (Midas List, 1st investor in twitter & Yammer, $1.4B under management)

Thank you for the opportunity to present Driveway at SVOD. It gave us much needed exposure to the wide investor community. Combining the pitch preparation classes with the presentation content guidance, we came out strong and confident from the podium. During the conference we had a chance to speak to many investors and industry leaders resulting in a very valuable feedback.

Jake Diner

Driveway Software

The organizers here are doing an amazing job with selecting the people who attend, selecting the speakers, coming up with ideas for panels and discussions. The truly amazing side is that the audience gets bigger, more involved, active and more thoughtful. It’s just a fun place to be!

Daniil Stolyarov

Investment Director, Almaz Capital Partners (102M under management)