Victor Schiller

Bio: After receiving a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Materials Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Masters in Business Administration from DePaul University, Mr. Schiller spent nearly twenty years battling it out in the trenches of the high-tech computer software and hardware world. He started with the nuts and bolts of Research and Development and rose through the ranks of Marketing to the CEO position of a leading computer software publisher.

Mr. Schiller ran the Eclipse Consumer Software Division for Phoenix Technologies (Nasdaq: PTEC) a leading provider of operating system level products to computer hardware manufacturers.

Mr. Schiller was the CEO of Fresh Brewed Media with its suite of Internet holdings and managed the company from startup through middle stage growth to the successful sale to a private equity group in 2011. He serves on the Fresh Brewed Media board of directors.

Fresh Brewed Media provides technology, services, and content to companies including Standard & Poor's, Fidelity Investments, TD Ameritrade, and Ameriprise Financial. The company has three patented technologies used to produce timely financial analysis and news.

Mr. Schiller is a frequent speaker at financial industry events, has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters and has appeared on CNBC.

Mr. Schiller lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife and three children. His outside interests include scuba diving, classical music, swimming and running. He runs twenty to thirty miles and swims three miles each week. He has competed in two marathons, one triathlon, and many other shorter distance races

Jim Lansing

Bio: An active angel investor in and advisor to start-up companies, Jim has been involved in numerous acquisitions, software licensing, and executive management positions

. Currently, Jim is Executive Chairman of Sammy Snacks, Inc, a manufacturer of super-premium dog food, cat food and treats. The title of Executive Chairman means doing whatever is necessary to create successful growth – marketing, taking out the trash, packaging, investing, etc. Jim's other passion is the Boy Scouts were he serves the Stonewall Jackson Area Council as President/Executive Committee/Board of Directors.

Previously, Jim served as Senior Vice President of Sales for Computer Associates. Jim's most recent assignment at CA was President and Representative Director of Computer Associates Japan. During the Japan assignment, Jim was also responsible for establishing CA-Japan Global Accounts.

During his 20 years at CA, Jim served as Vice President of Computer Operations Worldwide building the foundation infrastructure for CA's present world-wide network. Jim also served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development and CIO, responsible for development and support of all graphics and PC software and CA's I.T. systems. Jim also served as Senior Vice President of International Marketing launching worldwide marketing programs in Europe, South America and Asia. Finally, Jim had an active involvement in numerous pre/post acquisitions, part of a very successful growth strategy at CA.

Jim began his Systems Engineering career at EDS in the early 70's and held Senior Consulting positions at Arthur D. Little and Planning Research Corporation. Jim graduated with honors from Texas A&M University - Commerce after an honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy with a tour of duty in Vietnam and he is an Eagle Scout.

Jim has been happily married to Karen for 44 years; they have two daughters and four grandchildren. Jim and Karen have resided in Earlysville for eleven years.

Zach Buckner

Bio: Zach Buckner is an engineer and entrepreneur based in Charlottesville, VA. He is the founder and CEO of Relay, the founder of Fanaticall, and a proud father of four.

Craig Honick

Bio: Craig Honick, Managing Partner of Charlottesville-based Sector Intelligence, is a brand strategist and organizational change consultant with more than 20 years\' experience working in and with start ups. An ethnographer, he uses insight into group culture to help clients position their brands and products for rapid and sustained adoption, as well as to create highly innovative work environments.

Craig’s career is also marked by successful business vision and innovation: he has been a founding executive with three pioneering technology companies, including one of the Web’s first commercial site development firms (1994), one of the Internet’s first full service automobile malls (1995), and the world’s first online time stamp registry for electronic files and documents (1997). He is currently an advisor to Kaleo Software, an Idealab-backed start up building a next generation platform for enterprise collaboration. A passionate advocate of disruptive value propositions, his innovations have been covered in a variety of publications including Inc., Fast Company, Entrepreneur, CIO, and Wired.

Susan Cohen

Bio: Susan Cohen is a PHD candidate at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she researches entrepreneurship, organizational learning, and innovation. Specifically, Susan’s research examines how nascent firms accelerate learning while participating in seed acceleration programs, and how incumbents use unlearning strategies to respond to disruptive innovation. Prior to joining academia, Cohen managed small and mid-sized technology companies. Most notably, she was the Director of Marketing and a member of the founding executive team of priceline.com. She also was a Vice President at Yoyodyne, an internet direct marketing company founded by Seth Godin and acquired by Yahoo! Cohen earned her undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Michigan, and her MBA from the JL Kellogg School of Management. Susan was recently awarded the university-wide UNC Tanner Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Alex Euler

Bio: Alex Euler is responsible for sourcing, diligencing and closing of seed and early stage investments. Prior to CIT, Euler was the Director of the Advantage Incubator at bwtech@UMBC and program manager for the Northrop Grumman Cync Program where, in addition to identifying and recruiting innovative cybersecurity companies for the program, he provided business mentorship and capital access services to entrepreneurs and worked to cultivate strategic relationships with various stakeholders, including investors. Prior to managing the incubator program, Alex spent several years at MdBio - one of the largest biotechnology trade associations in the nation, where he led a number of initiatives designed to assist nearly 300+ emerging bioscience member companies. Alex has also been involved with several start-ups over the years in both the life sciences and social media as either an early employee or co-founder.

Alex holds a BS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UMBC, studied biotechnology at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, and is an MBA candidate at the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. He has been an author on several scientific papers in a diversity of areas from molecular biology to physical chemistry and spectroscopy.

Jennifer O'Daniel

Bio: Jennifer O'Daniel is responsible for sourcing, diligencing and closing of seed and early stage investments. Throughout her career, O'Daniel has invested in 62 seed and early-stage companies via CIT GAP Funds which has been recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine\'s Annual VC100 list since 2006. O'Daniel is a member of the Young Atlantic Venture Association, MIT Enterprise Forum, CFA Society of Washington and the Young Venture Capital Society. In addition to serving on various board of directors for GAP portfolio companies, O'Daniel currently sits on the board of directors for The Richmond Venture Forum, the board of advisors for Foster.ly, a mentor for Founder's Institute and The Fort Accelerator, and has previously served on the boards of Leadership Fairfax, Northern Virginia Therapeutic Riding Program, Virginia Tech Business Technology Center, and William and Mary's Technology and Business Center.

Prior to joining CIT, O'Daniel worked with the Business/Technology Center in Blacksburg, Virginia spinning-out technology companies from Virginia Tech, writing SBIR Proposals, and helping companies raise angel and venture capital. O'Daniel also worked as a financial consultant making acquisitions for SVIT Holding Company in Maribor, Slovenia. She also started and ran two companies while in college – one with a successful outcome and the other a complete failure. O'Daniel holds Bachelor of Sciences in Business Information Technology and Management from Virginia Tech.

Andrew Montalenti

Bio: Andrew is a technologist with nearly a decade of experience in software engineering. He is co-founder and CTO of Parse.ly, a company that provides insights to the web's best publishers. At Parse.ly, he leads the product development team that builds Parse.ly Dash, a media analytics dashboard used by editors, writers, and managers at some of the web's biggest news and information sites. Andrew earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science (with honors and departmental distinction) from NYU. After graduating, he acted as a technical lead on a small software team within Morgan Stanley. Prior to founding Parse.ly, he built large-scale web applications and systems through Aleph Point, Inc., the software engineering consultancy he owned and operated. His team served large clients like ThomasNet, NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation, Publishers Clearing House, as well as other small and mid-size technology companies such as HiiDef, Inc., IRAmarket, and Tal.ly. A dedicated Pythonista, JavaScript hacker, and open source advocate, Andrew is also a published technical author and editor. His hobbies include unfollowing people on Twitter and not reading his "toread" Delicious links.

John Feminella

Bio: John Feminella is an agile booster, codesmith, and occasional public speaker hailing from New York and Charlottesville. Along with his two partners, John is the cofounder of Fluxcrux, a nascent technology solutions consultancy and laboratory of fun ideas. He also serves as the Chief Technology Officer for Cardagin Networks, a startup providing mobile loyalty and customer retention solutions to businesses.

He contributes to open-source software on a regular basis, and has answered hundreds of questions on StackOverflow and GitHub. He's also active in the entrepreneurship and business communities both on the East Coast and locally in Virginia. When he's not developing software or leading technical teams, John enjoys getting soundly thrashed by his betters in tennis and golf, teaching short courses at the University of Virginia, and trolling the Internet.

Brenden Grace

Bio: Brenden Grace has spent the last twelve years hacking kernels, designing network appliances, bootstrapping startups and now, following you around the internet showing you eerily relevant, and possibly annoying, ads. As Director of Engineering for Collective, Brenden is responsible for networked APIs that receive tens of thousands of requests per second and has designed processing pipelines that make all of this data actionable in real-time. Brenden is author of the somewhat popular open source library em-mongo, but to complicate things, suggests you not use MongoDB.

A native of Virginia, Brenden has lived in Charlottesville for five years with his wife Sarah. Both are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the newest member of their family, who is due any day now.

 Jim Cheng

Bio: As Secretary of Commerce & Trade, Jim Cheng manages the jobs and opportunity agenda for Virginia. In this role, Secretary Cheng oversees thirteen state agencies focused on promoting the growth of Virginia's vibrant business community and attracting new investment into Virginia's economy.

Secretary Cheng has over 20 years of experience in information technology and government contracting, and is active in angel investment and early stage entrepreneurial ventures of various types

. He was most recently the President of Totus Lighting Solutions, a startup efficient-energy firm, and mentored several emerging companies.

From 1994-2005, Secretary Cheng was founder and CEO of CHM, a government contracting company specializing in Information Technology, which he grew from a staff of 5 people to 550 and $90M in revenue at the time of sale in 2005. In 1999, his company was named Virginia Business Magazine's fastest growing private company in Virginia and #12 fastest growing private US company in Inc Magazine's "Inc 500". In 2001, he was named SE Virginia's KPMG Entrepreneur of the year. From 1981-1994 at ECI, a government IT contracting firm, Secretary Cheng held various management and technical positions, rising to the position of Sr. Vice President of Marketing.

Secretary Cheng is active in the community and has served on the boards of non-profits, state-level and community organizations. He was a board member of the Virginia Small Business Finance Authority from 1999-2007, and is currently a Trustee of the Darden School Foundation at UVA, and a member of the ODU Education Foundation Board. Secretary Cheng holds a BS Degree in Computer Science from Old Dominion University, a MBA from the Colgate Darden Graduate School of Business (UVA) and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center.

Long-time residents of Virginia Beach, Jim and his wife, Jeanette, moved to Northern Virginia in the late 1990's, where they reside.

Brian Kannry

Bio: Brian Kannry is a technology venture capitalist with experience in finance, media, education, and as an entrepreneur. Prior to joining Court Square Ventures, Brian held the position of Vice President in Merrill Lync'’s Technology Investment Banking group in Palo Alto, California, as well as positions in Capital Markets and Equity Research for JPMorgan. Mr. Kannry served as Vice President of Business Development for Charlottesville-based startup and online media company Musictoday, in which Live Nation acquired a majority stake in 2006. He has authored multiple cases for the MBA program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School and earned his BA in Government and International Relations from Cornell University.