About SkillSlate

Canaan Partners

Canaan Partners is a global venture capital firm that invests in people who turn visionary ideas into valuable and significant technology & healthcare companies. We were early investors in some of the world’s leading technology companies, including Acme Packet, CommerceOne, DoubleClick and Match.com and as well as healthcare giants Cerexa, Dexcom, Northstar Neuroscience and Peninsula Pharmaceuticals.

http://www.canaan.com/

First Round Capital

First Round Capital is a seed stage fund dedicated to helping talented entrepreneurs build remarkable companies. Often providing a company’s first outside capital, the team at First Round likes to take an active role and work with the founders to launch a new product or service. First Round Capital invests nationally and has offices in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.

http://www.firstround.com/

Phin Barnes

Phin Barnes is a Principal at First Round Capital. Phin worked at AND 1 from "day 2" and helped grow the company from revenues of $15 million to over $225 million as the creative director for footwear. After leaving AND 1 in 2002, Phin founded an independent videogame company that developed and published Yourself!Fitness, the first fitness game for Xbox and PlayStation 2. Phin has also has consulted with several companies, including MTV Networks, where he focused on non-traditional games and the growth of the MTV Games division beginning in 2006. Phin earned his MBA with honors from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business with a double major in Operations and Information Management and Finance.

Dan Ciporin

Dan is a Partner at Canaan Partners, where he is committed to building innovative businesses that make the Internet a more engaging place for consumers. Previously, Dan was the Chairman and CEO of Shopping.com, where he oversaw growth from zero to over $100 million in revenues in just five years, culminating in the company’s IPO in October 2004 and later acquisition by eBay in 2005. Previously, Dan served as chairman of the Internet Lab, a US-Israeli incubator for early-stage consumer Internet startups, as Senior VP of MasterCard International, where he was responsible for the marketing and product management of all online global debit products, and as a strategy consultant for both Mars and Co. and Corporate Value Associates.

Dan earned an AB from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and an MBA from Yale University. After serving in 1980 as Director of Educational Programs for the UN-funded Sakaeo Refugee Camp in Thailand – where he lived in a teak stilt house in the middle of a remote rice paddy – Dan has continued to support volunteer organizations in that part of the world.

John Caplan

John is the founder and CEO of The OpenSky Project, the first global expert-powered online retail market that empowers individuals to sell products about which they are passionate and vocal. Prior to starting OpenSky, John was the President and CEO of Ford Models, which he joined in 2002 and grew into a premier international modeling agency. Prior to Ford Models, John served as Chief Marketing Officer of About.com and as President of the About.com network, and played a key role in the company’s sale to Primedia for $700mm in 2001. His early experience includes leading the strategic development and marketing for the launch of the Arizona Iced Tea brand and overseeing regional marketing for Starbucks Coffee Company.

John graduated from the University of Rochester with a B.A. in English, and lives in NYC.

Gokul Rajaram

Gokul is the co-founder and CEO of Chai Labs, a technology platform that enables publishers to easily customize and launch scalable, search-friendly sites in several verticals. Previously, Gokul was Director of Product Management at Google where he was informally known as one of the “godfathers of AdSense” for helping to launch one of Google’s most profitable ad products. He also helped drive a number of Google’s acquisitions, including DoubleClick, AdScape, and dMarc. Earlier in his career, Gokul worked as a technical architect at Juno Online, where he developed the back-end advertising system that drove much of Juno’s revenues and helped it go public in 1999.

Gokul has an M.B.A. from MIT Sloan, a M.S. in Computer Science from UT Austin, and a BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur where he received the President’s Gold Medal for being Class Valedictorian.