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Kevin O’Connor

Managing Partner

Kevin O’Connor bridges both sides of the technology industry with over 35 years of combined experience as a visionary entrepreneur and venture investor. As founder and investor in several successful companies, including a number that went public or were acquired by entities such as Amazon, Google, and IBM, Kevin offers a multifaceted perspective on business and investing.

Kevin founded his most recent startup, Graphiq, in 2009; he served as CEO until Amazon acquired the Santa Barbara company in 2017, in order to make Alexa one of the best personal assistants in the world. Kevin first achieved prominence in the tech world as the co- founder and CEO of the Internet advertising technology company DoubleClick, which Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion. Under Kevin’s leadership, DoubleClick rapidly expanded in five years to over 2,500 people in 25 countries. While at the University of Michigan, Kevin founded and served as the vice president of research at his first company, Intercomputer Communications Corporation, which was acquired by DCA in 1992.

As a venture capitalist, Kevin applies his company-side experience by investing in and advising a number of outstanding technology companies. Internet Security Systems, which went public and was acquired by IBM for $1.3 billion, represents one notable example. Kevin has served on four public company boards and many private company boards

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Mike Tucker

General Partner

Mike launched, scaled and consulted software companies from $0 -> $100 Million in revenue. He founded M3Rev, a consultancy which drove Go-To-Market, revenue acceleration, and scalable inside sales strategy for Public, Private Equity, and Venture backed software companies. Prior to that, he was one of the earliest employees and head of sales at RightSignature.com which processes millions of contracts and signatures every year. He founded and helped grow the sales team from 0 -> 300 sellers after the acquisition to Citrix generating >300% YoY revenue growth. Mike’s experience building companies, selling software, managing go-to-market teams, designing predictable revenue machines, leading outbound sales orgs, and wearing multiple hats across startups, provides a unique advantage for founders looking to accelerate growth and build long lasting durable businesses.

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Ivan Bercovich

General Partner

Ivan spent ten years at Graphiq, a startup which was eventually acquired by Amazon. At Graphiq, he built one of the largest general knowledge graphs and developed natural language understanding and generation technology. The system his team developed powers the majority of Alexa’s open domain question understanding and answering. Ivan is a holistic product leader who has managed large teams (130+) comprised of software developers, product managers, and knowledge engineers. Ivan's technical expertise is in structured data and conversational systems. He has also spent many years refining the human-in-the-loop model, pushing humans up the stack as ML techniques improve. He loves thinking and experimenting with management and organizational approaches to optimize product/ software development and foster innovation.

Cormac O’Connor

General Partner

Cormac O'Connor was an early member of Tinder's Data Analytics Team. During his time at Tinder, Cormac analyzed, and contributed to, all aspects of the business (revenue, customer behavior, marketing, pr, finance, product, etc.), and experienced Tinder going through monetization, IPO (Match Group), and scaling. His primary focuses on the business were testing, releasing, analyzing, and discovering new products, as well as improving customer retention. He worked closely with the product team to test and discover new features. He also worked with the data science team to improve recommendations for users and the push notification team to improve retention, reactivation, and engagement. He provided PR & Marketing with interesting data to be used in stories, and he helped determine marketing's impact on user growth through his registration prediction model. Through his experiences at Tinder, he has an excellent understanding of how data can be used across all the different aspects of the business to make better decisions.

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Natalie Hubbard

Associate

Natalie Hubbard focuses on finding the common thread between what early-stage founders need to scale their companies and the operational expertise that the ScOp team provides. Following her educational background in behavioral neuroscience, she became interested in exploring business and software, leading her to venture capital. She expresses her curiosity about technology by sourcing investments, introducing founders to ScOp, conducting due diligence, and assisting in projects for portfolio companies.

Heike Schirmer

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Dr. Heike Schirmer is an accomplished tech and product leader with a passion for bringing software ideas from concept to launch to scale. As Director for Alexa's Knowledge Graph at Amazon, Heike has been on the forefront of revolutionizing human-computer interactions through the power for Alexa. Her focus has been on making Alexa more natural and helpful by combining machine learning with structured data to answer millions of customer queries worldwide every day. Heike came to Amazon via the acquisition of Graphiq, a Santa Barbara based start-up, where Heike was Director of Product. Before Graphiq, Heike was Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Munich where she consulted tech and public sector clients on organizational and strategic topics.

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