Donald E. Weeden - Chairman

Don is an outside director and a representative of our investors. He is currently Chairman of Weeden Securities Corporation, the General Partner of Weeden & Co., L.P., a New York Stock Exchange member firm, and a member of the National Association of Securities Dealers. In the sixties and seventies Weeden & Co. was regarded as the leader in the third market. He served on several committees involved in market structure including the Composite Tape Committee, Consolidated Quotation Committee, the Intermarket Trading System Committee and the S.E.C.'s National Market Advisory Board. He has also been an active investor in high technology ventures and companies related to the securities industry. In 1959 he was a founder of National Semiconductor Corporation and a Director since 1962. Subsequent venture investments included Instinet Corp., Autex, Cadence Design, and Quantum Health. He has a BA in economics from Stanford University. From 1952 to 1956 he served in the United States Air Force.

Cary Ussery

Cary has a strong, successful engineering and management background. Cary is President & CEO of Vivace Semiconductor, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company delivering secure video processing chips that address the needs of next generation consumer electronics products. Cary's career includes working at a government contractor (Intermetrics, Inc.), a startup company (Vantage Analysis Systems subsequently purchased by Viewlogic Systems), and an established EDA software company (Cadence Design Systems). He is a founder and past President & CEO of Improv Systems, Inc., Prior to Improv Systems, Cary was the Group Director of Core Technology for Cadence's Alta Business Unit.  Cary has written numerous papers and is co-author of the textbook "VHDL: Hardware Description and Design". He received a BA in Music and a BA in Math from Bard College.

Victor Berman – President & CEO Improv Systems

Victor is an experienced executive charged with leading the growth and expansion of Improv's product roadmap and entry into new geographies.  Victor has a strong background in engineering, management and strategic marketing.  He is well known in the EDA and electronics industry for his leadership in the development and proliferation of standards.  His skills in developing new approaches and clearly communicating benefits to a variety of stakeholders, coupled with his ability to execute will be significant assets to Improv.

Prior to coming to Improv, Victor was Group Director for Language Standards at Cadence Design Systems, Inc. responsible for the corporate language strategy and played a role as an industry driver promoting standards based design flows from the tool supplier point of view.  This experience required understanding and resolution of the issues faced in utilizing third party IP in the SOC design and verification flow, including address emerging needs such as expanding that flow to cover advanced low power design for today’s consumer electronics.   Prior to Cadence, Victor headed sales and marketing at Improv Systems, Inc.  This first stint at Improv gave him an appreciation and understanding of the challenges and benefits of integrating innovative IP into mainstream design and verification flows

Victor’s formal training was in language design and electrical engineering in the interdisciplinary Computer Science graduate program at Carnegie Mellon University.  This training was put to good use when he headed the team that developed the VHDL language and the first suite of tools to support it.  Since then, he has managed large development teams including the Verilog-XL team at Cadence. 

Eric Ross

Eric is a Partner, and Chief Investment Strategist and Associate Director of Research. Prior to joining ThinkEquity Partners LLC, he was the Director of Electronics Research at Investec, a global investment bank with 5,500 employees, directing five analysts and associated staff covering roughly 60 names. Prior to Investec, Eric was Senior Research Analyst covering Semiconductors and Semiconductor Capital Equipment Companies at Thomas Weisel Partners from its inception until May 2002. While at Weisel, he was the top producing analyst, generating $25 million in revenue in 2001, a down year for the industry. Eric was formerly the Associate Research Analyst covering Semiconductors and Semiconductor Capital Equipment Companies at BofA / Montgomery Securities, and the Research Associate at Furman Selz covering Networking Equipment and Communications Semiconductors. Eric began his sell-side career as a Corporate Finance Analyst with Oppenheimer's Technology Corporate Finance Group in San Francisco. Eric is a frequent contributor on CNBC, Bloomberg, CNNfn, WebFN and print media including the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Reuters, Associated Press and other industry sources. Eric received an MS in Chemical Physics from University of California at Berkeley, and a BS in Chemistry from the University of Rochester.

Tim McDonald

Timothy J. McDonald graduated with a degree in Business Administration/Accounting from Albany Business College in 1975. He also attended the State University of New York at Utica/Rome where he majored in Managerial Finance/Business Administration. Mr. McDonald began his career on Wall Street as a Sales trainee at Moseley Hallagarten, Estabrook and Weeden in 1979. In 1981 he became an institutional sales trader. In 1986, Mr. McDonald left Mosely to become a Managing Director, founding partner and senior sales with Weeden & Co. Weeden & Co. was a New York Stock Exchange member firm and Mr. McDonald was an allied member of the New York Stock Exchange from June of 1986 until July of 2005, at which time Weeden & Co. dropped its New York Stock Exchange membership. Today, Mr. McDonald serves as a Managing Director of Weeden & Co.’s as it’s most senior institutional sales trader working in their Boston office.

Seiji Miwa

Seiji has nearly forty years of experience in the electronics industry. He is currently a vice president of Magma Design Automation KK. Prior to Magma, Seiji was Chairman of Cadence Japan. He has also held positions as vice president with Teradyne Japan and Crown Corporation. Prior to that he was with Torpe Corporation where he was responsible for the successful sales expansion of that company into the United States. Seiji's knowledge of the Japanese semiconductor and consumer electronics industries is most welcome and has been and is instrumental in our understanding and penetration of the Japanese market.

Victor Berman – President & CEO Improv Systems

Victor is an experienced executive charged with leading the growth and expansion of Improv's product roadmap and entry into new geographies.  Victor has a strong background in engineering, management and strategic marketing.  He is well known in the EDA and electronics industry for his leadership in the development and proliferation of standards.  His skills in developing new approaches and clearly communicating benefits to a variety of stakeholders, coupled with his ability to execute will be significant assets to Improv.

Prior to coming to Improv, Victor was Group Director for Language Standards at Cadence Design Systems, Inc. responsible for the corporate language strategy and played a role as an industry driver promoting standards based design flows from the tool supplier point of view.  This experience required understanding and resolution of the issues faced in utilizing third party IP in the SOC design and verification flow, including address emerging needs such as expanding that flow to cover advanced low power design for today’s consumer electronics.   Prior to Cadence, Victor headed sales and marketing at Improv Systems, Inc.  This first stint at Improv gave him an appreciation and understanding of the challenges and benefits of integrating innovative IP into mainstream design and verification flows

Victor’s formal training was in language design and electrical engineering in the interdisciplinary Computer Science graduate program at Carnegie Mellon University.  This training was put to good use when he headed the team that developed the VHDL language and the first suite of tools to support it.  Since then, he has managed large development teams including the Verilog-XL team at Cadence. 

Diane Flynn - Chief Financial Officer and VP of Business Development, Founder

Diane's career has ranged from management consulting (Price Waterhouse) to product marketing (HP's Network Server Division) to business development and mergers and acquisitions (HP's Medical Products Group). As a Manager for Group Development at Hewlett-Packard's Medical Products Group, Diane was responsible for working with separate business units on strategic planning, also supporting deal flow which included evaluating, structuring and negotiating strategic alliances and equity transactions. She received a BA in Literature from Bard College and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.