Nobska Ventures Adds Four New Advisors
Stevenson, Maryland, January 30, 2006
Our Board of Advisors now consists of 20 individuals with diverse backgrounds and expertise, including prominent later stage VC’s, successful entrepreneurs, and leading experts in our areas of specific investment interest from academia, government and business.
Nobska Ventures’ Advisors are an essential part of our investment process, often providing both proprietary deal flow and critical analysis of our seed and early stage venture capital investment opportunities. Advisors also enhance our capacity to deliver ongoing counsel and connections which accelerate our portfolio companies’ success.
Craig Miller, Ph.D. is a former Chief Scientist with SAIC, a $7bn research and engineering company, where he managed the Modeling and Analysis division and created SAIC’s Electronic Commerce Rapid Application Development Laboratory to develop methodology and tools for e-commerce applications and to serve as an incubator for e-commerce ventures within and outside of SAIC. For his work, Dr. Miller received a gold medal in 1998 from the Smithsonian Institution for “Heroic Achievement in Information Technology” and SAIC’s 1999 award for outstanding technical performance. Dr. Miller has also served as CTO of Proxicom, one the best known and successful of the e-business integrators of the 1990s, prior to its acquisition by Dimension Data, a $2.7bn global systems integrator, based in Africa, for whom he served as North American CTO and Global Chief Architect. Dr. Miller is a frequent lecturer and speaker in the areas of energy and environmental technology, software quality, application integration, information security, advanced IT architecture, and distributed systems and he has taught electronic commerce and IT at the University of Virginia and applied mathematics and computer science at the University of Colorado
Peter Corte is a business development executive with deep experience in government, DOD, DHS, and commercial procurement, having served in senior roles with Northrup Grumman, CSC, Raytheon, and SAIC. Mr Corte is the founder of ORBITRON Corporation, an organization of 10 senior associates who advise Fortune 500 companies in international strategic business development and technology planning. Mr. Corte currently serves on the Board of Directors/Trustees and is a 20 year member of the National Defense Industrial Association, the premier organization that addresses issues between industry and DOD. He also chairs NDIA’s International Committee and is a charter member of its Homeland Security Division. Mr. Corte holds an active DOD TS clearance. He is also a Senior Associate of FBA, Inc., a 25 year US Government relations firm based in DC that has placed more than $5 billion in advanced technology initiatives for its primarily university clients. Mr. Corte also serves as Chairman of the Board of the Total Learning Research Institute (TLRI), a non-profit education and leadership development organization that has developed advanced programs that center on NASA’s methodology of distributed team-based solving of very complex problems.
Bill Seiglein has spent 25 years in the IT industry specializing in information security, risk and compliance management, including 11 years with the National Security Agency, 6 years with Booz, Allen & Hamilton consulting to the US and foreign intelligence communities, 3 years as the security infrastructure planner at T. Rowe Price Investments, and 3 years as the Security Solutions Architect for Fortrex Technologies. He is currently the VP of Corporate Strategy with True North Solutions, a premier information security solutions provider in North America. Mr. Sieglein has also held key positions with many of his major consulting clients, including the Director of IT Security for an international, touch-less bank; the Director of Information Security for a large, non-profit, membership organization, and, most recently, Mr. Seiglein held the position of Chief Security Officer for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) – the organization established by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Mr. Sieglein is a frequent speaker at conferences and symposia. He is the co-author of the book “Security Planning & Disaster Recovery” with former Fortrex CTO Eric Maiwald. He has authored numerous articles for paper and on-line magazines and was the security expert for one of CMP on-line magazines. He is also on the Gerson-Lehrman consulting board where he frequently advises investment professionals on the state of the information security market.
Steph Jackson is an experienced investment analyst and asset manager beginning his financial career in 1984. He is currently Vice President and Portfolio Manager/Analyst of Brown Capital Management in Baltimore, MD, where he leads the firm’s equity investments in publicly-held technology companies. Mr. Jackson was previously Portfolio Manager/Director of Research at NCM Capital Management and an analyst at Putnam Investments, ARCO Investment Management Company and First Union National Corporation Capital Management Group. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), earned a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Science (BS) from the University of North Carolina in Business Administration where he was a Morehead Scholar. Mr. Jackson is a Board Member at the Gilman School, Baltimore Community Foundation and former Board Member of St. Ignatius Loyola Academy.