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MANAGEMENT GROUP

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Christopher is the managing director and founder of Emergent Venture Partners. Earlier in his career, he was a portfolio analyst with GE Finance and a member of a private wealth team at Morgan Stanley in Washington DC. He then helped create over a dozen niche funds for a boutique investment advisory group out of New York. Chris also has been on the other side of the table, as an entrepreneur and CEO/CFO for several start-ups. Most recently, he spent several years in the family office sector, sourcing deal flow in venture, late-stage growth, secondaries, and the middle market, for several ultra-high net worth families.

 

Christopher co-founded a Super PAC in 2012, is the former Chair of the both the Washington D.C. and Greater Salt Lake BYU Alumni Chapters, is a member of Infragard (an FBI/private sector collaboration), holds a US security clearance, and has participated on numerous boards and councils.  He was a trustee for Utah's largest performing arts group, Hale Center Theater. Christopher is a graduate of Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management.

Christopher Kirkland

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Managing Director

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Roy Glasberg

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Director

Roy Glasberg founded and managed Google's Global Acceleration programs (LATAM, ASIA, AFRICA, CEE), Google CorpDev and unicorn accelerator, the Google AI Studio and Google sustainability Accelerator. In the last 3 years he has built Google's global mentoring program for startups as Global Manager of the Launchpad Google Startup program, scaling it to over 40 countries. Previously Roy was head of Campus TLV and led Developer Relations for Google in Israel and Europe. Before joining Google, Roy was the Director of business development at LivePerson, building the Liveperson market place for startups and integrating innovative solutions. Roy was also the Head of Business Development and Business Solutions at Microsoft, where he was leading the BI market for Enterprises and Government. Roy has a vast experience in strategy formulation and implementation working as a Senior consultant for Deloitte and for HayGroup.

Roy holds 4 university degrees in Law, Business management, Software IP and financial engineering from The IDC and Hebrew University. Roy’s team includes his wife Zohar, their 4 daughters, and Chewy their golden retriever. 

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ADVISORS

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Craig Gygi is a recognized leader in operations. His career has focused on helping companies develop and implement a better, scalable, sustainable way to work. His innovation, passion, diligence, technical depth, and leadership has led those he’s worked with to strategic advantages in customer value/satisfaction, growth in revenues and shareholder value, improved margins, accelerated times to market, and greatly improved engagement and respect for employees.

Craig has served in several senior executive positions, and as a consultant, business advisor, educator, entrepreneur, and engineer. As COO of Purple—a multi-channel comfort technology manufacturer and retailer—Craig led all operations, enabling a $1B valuation within months of launch. At cloud QMS software leader MasterControl, Craig led global operations to 3X growth while doubling productivity. As an entrepreneur, Craig successfully developed and launched TolStack, an engineering analysis software package used for designing quality products or services. Craig has also served in other key roles including CEO, operational excellence/lean/six sigma, software development, product design/management, data/analytics, services, medical device and pharma, aerospace, and electronics. Craig has international operations/supply chain experience in Asia, Europe, and the South Pacific.

Craig loves learning and teaching. He has authored multiple best-selling books on operations and data-driven improvement. He also has taught operations at the Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. Hundreds of professionals have benefited from his operations and problem-solving training, coaching, and mentoring. Craig holds MS and BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from BYU.

Craig Gygi​

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Advisor

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Aman Verjee

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Advisor/Investment Committee

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Mr. Verjee has more than 15 years of financial and operational experience from both private and public technology companies. He has been a member of the management teams at some of the most successful and beloved companies in the world, including PayPal, eBay and Sonos.

Aman was the Chief Operating Officer of 500 Startups, which during his tenure was the world’s most active venture capital company. In that role, Aman managed the global fundraising, seed accelerator and Series A growth programs, and was a member of the Investment Committee for the firm’s global funds with over $200 million in AUM.

Aman has also served as CFO at CAN Capital, a leading alternative finance platform that provides access to over $1 billion in annual working capital for small businesses. Under Aman’s leadership, CAN Capital obtained and managed $850 million in financing, from two sources: a warehouse line and senior debt facility from 12 banks (including Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Barclays, UBS and SunTrust); and a securitization that was rated as investment grade by S&P and DBRS.

Prior to that, Aman served as CFO and Secretary of the Board of Directors at Visto, Inc. (formerly Collective, Inc.), a late stage advertising technology company backed by Accel Partners, Greycroft, iNovia Capital, Samsung Ventures and Cox Media Group. In that role, Aman led the finance, legal, facilities and IT departments. During his tenure, Visto filed a 424B prospectus with the SEC, preparing to go public, and cleared all SEC comments in two rounds.

Prior to his role at Visto, Aman served as the Chief Financial Officer at Sonos, Inc. a consumer electronics company based in Santa Barbara and Boston that builds wireless sound systems for houses. Sonos (NASDAQ: SONO) generated nearly $1 billion in annual revenues in 2017, and went public in 2018.

Prior to Sonos, Aman spent eight years at eBay, Inc., mostly at PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002. Aman was the Chief Financial Officer of eBay’s North America business, which generated over $2 billion in revenues and nearly $1 billion in operating profit. Aman also led the strategic planning teams for both eBay Marketplaces and PayPal, ran Global Analytics for eBay Marketplaces, and led the financial planning and analysis team and customer analytics teams for PayPal.

Aman’s first job out of university was with Lehman Brothers, where he was an analyst in the sales and trading program. He spent two years working in the Financial Engineering practice, which works with capital markets clients to manage debt exposure. Later on, Aman was an associate consultant at McKinsey & Co in Dallas, Texas, prior to joining PayPal.

He has an B.A. from Stanford University, where he majored in Public Policy (Economics and Political Science) and holds a J.D. from Harvard University’s Law School, where he graduated in 2001.
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