Judges

Dr. Chang "Charles" Choo is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of DSP/FPGA Laboratory at San Jose State University, San Jose, California. He was Senior Member of Technical Staff with Altera Corporation for two years from January 1999. From 1986 to 1998, he was a faculty member of Electrical Engineering Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, and, later, at San Jose State University. He taught and did research on DSP, video and image compression/processing, and computer architecture. He is currently doing research/consulting/teaching on various DSP hardware and software design, including FPGA computer vision system for driverless car, digital video/audio processing,  and acoustic noise cancellation. He has over 80 journal and conference publications and 7 patents in these areas. He was a member of Technical Committee with several professional conferences including SPIE, DesignCon, and DSP World/ICSPAT. He was a consultant for various companies including Philips Semiconductor, National Semiconductor (acquired by Texas Instruments), Ricoh Innovations, Skybox (acquired by Google), and Volkswagen. Dr. Choo received his PhD in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

Jay focuses on consumer technology including mobile, gaming, and consumer devices. He also leads TransLink's activities supporting portfolio companies with their customers and partners primarily in Korea. Active current investments include Chartboost, Epic, nWay, Peel, Quixey, SoundHound, and Tango. Noteworthy past investments include Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB), Enterprise DB (acquired by Peak Equity), and YuMe (NYSE: YUME). Before co-founding TransLink, Jay was the head of Samsung Ventures America. Jay directly led several successful Samsung Ventures' investments including AnalogTech (NASDAQ: AATI), Continuous Computing (acquired by RadiSyS), DivX (NASDAQ: DIVX), InPhi (NASDAQ: IPHI), Intellon (NASDAQ: ITLN), MontaVista (acquired by Cavium), Pure Digital (acquired by Cisco), Techwell (NASDAQ: TWLL) and Teknovus (acquired by Broadcom). Prior to joining Samsung, Jay was an investment officer with the Silicon Valley office of Vertex Management, a global VC firm headquartered in Singapore. At Vertex, Jay focused on investments in communications, mobile, and Internet including Aicent (acquired by Syniverse), GRIC Communications (NASDAQ: GRIC), Mobile 365 (acquired by Sybase), and PayPal (acquired by eBay). Before Vertex, Jay was Senior Director of business development at Dialpad Communications (acquired by Yahoo). Jay also worked as an Associate at McKinsey in Palo Alto, New York, Beijing, and Seoul and at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. Jay received his MBA degree from Stanford University and an M.S. in Biochemistry and B.S. in Chemistry from Seoul National University. Jay serves as President & Board Director of the Asia America MultiTechnology Association (AAMA) and Board Director of the Association of Asian American Investment Managers (AAAIM). He is also an Advisor for Korea Innovation Center (KIC) Silicon Valley. Jay enjoys travel, Sci-Fi movies, and spicy food.

Perry Ha is the founder and Managing Director of Draper Athena, a member of the DFJ Global Network. He has been an active venture investor since 1997; and has invested and served on the board of many successful companies including iPivot (acq by Intel), Demandtec (IPO then acq by IBM), Imparto Software (acq by PKS), ProfitLogic (acq by Oracle), and Zantaz (acq by Autonomy). He also served as interim CEO in two different companies. He currently serves on the board of several companies in Korea and the US including Mobeam, OGPlanet, Precursor Energetics, and Relay2.

Rick Rasmussen is a Silicon Valley native with entrepreneurial, executive, government and academic experience focusing on startups and growth stage companies.  He works extensively with governments and economic development agencies looking to connect with Silicon Valley.  He is an active member of the Sand Hill Angels investment group. He served as the VP of Business Development for nestGSV, a large-scale accelerator in Silicon Valley where he focused on International Business Development and Acceleration Programs. Prior, Mr. Rasmussen served as the Trade Commissioner for the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade with responsibility for linking Canadian IT companies to the Valley.  Prior, he served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Institutional Venture Partners, Interim CEO for @Road, President and CEO for BuzMe.com.  He currently advises a half-dozen companies in mobile and international social media and serves as a Director of CritterPix, an animated feature film startup in Marin County, CA. His professional experience includes C-Cube Microsystems (LSI) where he was Vice President of Marketing and General Manager and helped drive the digital video revolution in consumer, computer and communications markets.  He was a senior member of the team that took the company from startup through IPO and Fortune 500 status. Prior he spent nine years at LSI Logic where he spearheaded new development of RISC microprocessors, Digital Signal Processors and standard cell product lines culminating as the General Manager of the MIPS Microprocessor Division. Mr. Rasmussen earned a Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree with highest honors from the University of California at Berkeley and an dual MBA degree from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and Columbia's Graduate School of Business in New York City with honors.  He currently lectures on Entrepreneurship at both UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

Bill Reichert has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and operating executive. Since joining Garage in 1998, Bill has focused on early-stage information technology and materials science companies. He has been a board director or board observer at CaseStack, WhiteHat Security, ClearFuels Technology, Simply Hired, MiaSole, D.light Design, ThermoCeramix, and VisaNow, among others. Prior to Garage, Bill was a co-founder or senior executive in several venture-backed technology startups, including Trademark Software, The Learning Company, and Academic Systems. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey & Company, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., and the World Bank. Bill earned a B.A. at Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Stanford UniBilversity. He was a founding board member and a Chairman of the Churchill Club, and a Board Member of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. Currently he is the Chairman of the Small Fund Roundtable of the VC Taskforce and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Kevin Scott is a managing director with SVB Capital. Scott oversees the company's relationships with many top-tier venture capital and private equity firms. In his role, Scott leverages the entire SVB platform and its member divisions. Scott is responsible for strategic relationships with select venture capital firms on the West Coast, sourcing and advising on direct equity co-investment, limited partnership, and portfolio company banking and lending opportunities. In addition, he helps emerging companies with equity fundraising strategy. Scott has more than twenty years of consulting and investing experience with technology companies and venture capital firms. Prior to this role, Scott was a partner with 3i Venture Capital for nine years where he invested in early stage IT companies and served on the Board of Directors of over 20 companies. Before 3i, Scott was a partner in the transaction services practice at PriceWaterhouseCoopers where he specialized in technology M&A. Scott earned a BA in Political Economics from the University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

Simon Shim is a lam research chair professor in computer engineering department at San Jose State University. He is in the editorial board of IEEE Computer (www.computer.org/computer) and the area editor of Internet and Web Technologies at Computer. He worked as a Director at SAP Labs, Palo Alto, CA, USA where he worked on the in-memory database, called Hana. He was a guest editor for the special issue on high speed security (2004), CAP (2012), and the next generation memory (2013) for IEEE Computer. He has published more than 50 papers in journals and conferences and 1 patent. He has co-authored one published technical book. He received PhD in computer science from University of Minnesota. His current research areas include Internet computing, database management, machine learning, and information retrieval. He has organized and served as a workshop chair of data engineering, mobile commerce and electronic commerce. He had been an editor for Web Technologies column at IEEE Computer for 5 years.

Mr. Stepanyan serves as the VP of Operations at Silicon Valley Innovation Center, and his primary focus is on establishing and refining the company's core structure, operational procedures, business plans and growth strategy. Mr. Stepanyan is a public speaker, consultant, mentor and advisor for startup teams and growing companies, concentrating his effort with the early-stage startups.