Lithium helps companies unlock the passion of their customers. Lithium software powers amazing Social Customer Experiences for more than 400 iconic brands including AT&T, BT, Best Buy, Indosat, Sephora, Skype and Telstra. Lithium helps companies grow brand advocacy, drive sales, reduce costs and accelerate innovation to create social communities that redefine the customer experience. For more information, visit lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own communitythe Lithosphere. Lithium is privately held with corporate headquarters in San Francisco, Calif. and offices in Europe, Asia and Australia.
Mr. Tarkoff has been a director since September 2012. Mr. Tarkoff is currently President and CEO of Lithium Technologies and has been responsible for its strategic direction and corporate vision since September 2011.
From April 2008 to September 2011, he served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Adobe Systems Digital Enterprise Solutions business unit.
Prior to joining Adobe, Mr. Tarkoff held several executive positions at EMC Corporation, Documentum, Inc. and Commerce One. Earlier in his career, Mr. Tarkoff was an Associate Attorney at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Additionally, Mr. Tarkoff is a member of the board of advisors for the Lawrence Hall of Science and has previously served on the board of directors for Borland Software Corporation and Onyx Software.
Mr. Tarkoff holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. degree from Amherest College.
Nader is President and COO at Linqia and is resposnsible for setting and executing on the strategic footprint of the company.
Previously, Nader was Senior Vice President of The Americas for Lithium Technologies and responsible for driving and managing the growth of the business. Nader joined Lithium Technologies as a co-founder when it was first incorporated, and carried broad responsibilities in both the sales and operations departments.
Prior to Lithium, Nader was the Director of Operations at Ofoto (now Kodak Gallery). An early employee, he was responsible for all fulfillment operations for the company, where he built the largest digital photo finishing facility and online frame store in the world. He was also responsible for all of its organization, processes, and personnel and was primarily responsible for driving Ofoto to the best gross margins in the industry, a key element in Kodaks subsequent acquisition.
Kerry is a full stack web developer focused on creating polished, usable applications that work well from start to finish. she got her start in software at Lithium Technologies where she was responsible for many high profile features including a mobile version of the platform as well as a contextual WYSIWYG editor for the entire web UI. At Gliffy, she prototyped Gliffy’s transition from flash to HTML5 and now works with her fellow developers in making Gliffy better, faster, and easier to use
Bridget is Vice President of Seattle Engineering, which builds major components of Redfin’s web site – including agent tools and Open Book – and manages the flow of data in Redfin’s architecture. Prior to joining Redfin, Bridget was Director of Analytics & Business Applications for Lithium Technologies, where she was responsible for applications and tools used to manage, moderate, measure, explore and grow online communities using Lithium’s flagship Social CRM product. While at IntrinsiQ, she founded the analytics team, which processed data from 300 source databases into a single data warehouse, and then displayed that data in a dashboard of insights. In addition, she has held management positions at two other start-ups: IMlogic and Plumtree Software. Bridget was graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in computer science.
VP, Sales APAC at Lithium Technologies
Pete Sonsini is the General Partner at New Enterprise Associates.
Pete joined NEA in 2005 and is Co – Head of NEAs enterprise software practice group. Previous investments include Xensource (acquired by Citrix Systems) and Teracent (acquired by Google).
Pete also serves on the board of the Silicon Valley Forum (www.svforum.org), and in 2011 was named as a “Rising Star” of the next generation of venture capital general partners by Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst.
Prior to joining NEA, Pete was Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at VMware where he struck the company’s OEM deals and grew annual sales through OEMs from $0 to $40 million in four years.
Prior to VMware, Pete was one of the first hires on the business side at Mirapoint, where he ran product management.
Pete also served in various Sales and Marketing positions in Hewlett-Packards server division, including Worldwide Product Manager for the mid-range server business.
Ravi Mohan has focused his entire career on the software business. Prior to co-founding Shasta Ventures, Ravi was a general partner at Battery Ventures where he led eight investments and served on the boards of 12 software and technology-enabled service companies.
Prior to joining Battery Ventures, Ravi built transaction-processing systems at Accenture, sold and implemented packaged software applications for Hyperion Software Corporation, and ran MIC, a software development firm based in India focused on business intelligence solutions to multinational corporations. Ravi also spent time at McKinsey & Company working with consumer packaged goods companies.
Ravi is very active in entrepreneurial circles and helped found the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Indian Venture Capital Association (IVCA) to leverage entrepreneurial activities between India and America.
Gordon Ritter is a Founder and General Partner of Emergence. Prior to founding Emergence, he spent over 15 years founding and building companies which pioneered new markets including embedded web-based interfaces, server appliances, “On Demand” services for the SMB market and web-native application development.
He led Emergence Capital’s first investment, in the cloud leader Salesforce.com. Gordon was named to the Forbes’ Midas List of the top venture capital investors in 2007 and 2012. He currently sits on the boards of Lithium, Veeva, Insightly, PivotLink, Zuberance, Genius and Top Hat.
Prior to founding Emergence, Gordon was co-Founder and CEO of Software As Service, a web services platform company he created with Marc Benioff, the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. Software As Service is the origin of Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform.
Doug is responsible for ensuring our customers on-going success with the Get Satisfaction platform and the associated best practices. He manages Professional Services and Education.
Doug has been focusing on customer success in the CRM and Social CRM technology space for over 14 years. Most recently, he was at Lithium Technologies as Senior Director of Business Operations, where he led the professional services team in implementing social CRM for clients like HP, Telefonica (O2), Pitney Bowes and Sephora. Prior to Lithium, Doug co-founded Propellix, a CRM consulting practice.
Doug is an avid sailor, was a member of the Canadian National Sailing Team, and continues to participate both locally and internationally.
Geoffrey Moore is a best-selling author, and is widely recognized for his expertise in market development and business and investment strategies. He serves as an advisor to many of MDV’s portfolio companies, drawing upon best practices derived from his extensive work with technology startups.
Geoffrey has made the understanding and effective exploitation of disruptive technologies the core of his life’s work. His books, Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, Living on the Fault Line, and Dealing with Darwin are best sellers and required reading at leading business schools. Highly regarded as a dynamic public speaker, Geoffrey is the founder of The Chasm Group and currently is managing director of TCG Advisors. Earlier in his career, he was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high tech marketing strategy and communications company, and for the decade prior, a sales and marketing executive in the software industry.
Brooke joined NEA in 2005 as a Venture Partner, focusing on software, systems and internet investments. He brings 30-plus years’ experience in technology finance and operations.
Brooke currently serves on the board of directors of Tableau Software (NYSE: DATA), Glu Mobile (NASDAQ: GLUU), Lithium Technologies, SiTime, SugarCRM, and Technical Communities.
He is also a board observer with Tabula. In addition to his NEA board responsibilities, Brooke serves on the board of directors of NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA).
Brooke was most recently a Partner with Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV).
Prior to that, he was Executive Vice President of NetDynamics, an application server software company, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1998.
From 1991 to 1997, Brooke was Senior Vice President, Finance and Operations and CFO of Synopsys, an electronic design automation software company, which he took public in 1992.
Peter Fenton is a General Partner at Benchmark. He joined the firm in 2006 after spending seven years as a partner with Accel Partners, where his investment interests included software, digital media, and technology enabled services.
Prior to joining the venture capital community, he spent several years working with Silicon Valley software and high-technology companies as an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. He was an early employee at Virage, a multimedia information retrieval company that went public on the NASDAQ in 2000. Peter also worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company in San Francisco, where he advised high-technology businesses in Silicon Valley on their product and business strategies.
Peter currently serves on the board of DotCloud, Elasticsearch, EngineYard, HortonWorks, Lithium, New Relic, Polyvore, Twitter, Yelp (IPO: YELP), Zendesk and Zuora.
As the Vice President & GM EMEA, Bruno is responsible for driving and managing the growth of Lithiums business in rapidly expanding international markets.
He joins Lithium with a 17 year track record of successfully creating and scaling high performing EMEA sales organizations for many different US companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Tivoli Systems, IBM, and Motive Communications. Most recently, Bruno was VP of Worldwide Sales at ON Networks, a new media company in the video content and advertizing space.
Prior to ON Networks, Bruno was responsible for building Motives business in Europe from zero to a 90 person organization contributing to more than half of the companys global revenue. Before Motive, Bruno was Vice President of EMEA sales for Tivoli Systems, before and after IBMs acquisition, managing a staff of over 400 people and business of over $1 billion in revenue.
As Chief Operating Officer, Charles is responsible for Lithium’s customer success, overseeing all facets of customer operations and business planning.
A strong advocate for customers and active customer support communities, Charles brings a long track record of building customer-centric organizations. Previously, Charles led the Partner Services team at Yahoo, helping its customers achieve their business goals with Yahoo’s monetization products. In this role, he led the team to deliver continuous optimization of the monetization solution to ensure ongoing customer success.
Charles also held multiple leadership roles at Interwoven, helping the company grow from a start-up to a recognized leader in enterprise content management. He led some of the largest deployments of Interwoven’s solutions and headed its Worldwide Support team, helping to increase the company’s customer satisfaction to record levels.
Lyle is responsible for the strategic direction and corporate vision at Lithium. He assumed the role of CEO in December, 2006.
Prior to starting Lithium Technologies, Lyle co-founded GX Media, where he was the CTO. He drove the development of Gamers.com, which was rated the #1 independent gaming portal by Nielsen NetRatings. Lyle was instrumental in raising a total of $15M in funding led by CMGI, negotiating multi-million dollar technology licensing deals with Dell, Sony, AltaVista, and Ziff-Davis, and spearheading the spin-off of Lithium Technologies. Lyle was also the driving force behind the creation of technologies for professional gaming, including a global rankings system, tournament engine, and a real-time match reporting and spectating system. These technologies were the key success factors behind the AMD PGL, the most successful and highly acclaimed professional gaming league to date with over 100 million media impressions, and also numerous tournaments for Sega.
Jeff Kearl is entrepreneur and angel investor. He has invested in over 30 start-ups since 2004 including Domo, Ancestry.com (IPO), Omniture (IPO), Coupa, Outright (acquired by GoDaddy), 99 Designs, ZEFR aka MovieClips.com, Dynamic Signal, InsideSales, Needle, Familylink (acquired by MyHeritage), Lithium, Skullcandy (IPO), Matuse, Stance and Celtek.
Jeff previously worked as an Associate at vSpring Capital. He was also the Executive Vice President and on the Board of Directors at Logoworks until it was acquired by HP in 2007.
User Experience Director at Lithium Technologies
Dennis Fong, also known as Thresh, is the founder of [Raptr](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/raptr), a new gaming social network that was announced in February 2008. He is a successful serial entrepreneur and celebrity in the gaming world. Dennis is best known for co-founding Xfire, an instant messenger and social networking site for gamers which was acquired by Viacom for US$102 million in April 2006, and winning John Carmack’s Ferrari 328 in a 1997 Quake tournament – see video below.
Co-founder and VP of Product for of TripLingo based in Atlanta, GA. With over 10+ years industry specialist knowledge and an adrenaline junkie whos known for creating highly intuitive/engaging digital products.
For over a decade Vince has specialized in creating, developing and implementing highly intuitive and engaging digital-media products for both large and small group organizations. He’s traveled to 15+ countries, consulted and managed teams for many Fortune 500 clients like Disney, BB&T and Lockheed Martin regarding products for their online and broadcast mediums as well as working with the Army National Guard.
Widely recognized for his pioneering work in online communities in business, Joe serves as Lithium’s Chief Community Officer. In this role, Joe is responsible for thought-leadership, research, and innovations that will drive the next generation of successful enterprise customer communities.
Joe’s work with online communities began in 1996, when he conducted the first comprehensive research study into successful practices for managing online communities. Since that time, he has worked as a consultant and researcher with nearly 300 companies using online communities to create more productive relationships with customers, partners, and employees.
While at Lithium, Joe has played a key role in launching successful communities for large, enterprise companies such as Barnes & Noble, Comcast, Juniper Networks, Linksys, PayPal, Symantec, and many others.
Director of Product at Lithium Technologies
VP of Alliances at Lithium Technologies