SVASE VC Breakfast Club with George Lauro of Alteon Capital, focus on Semiconductor, MEMS, photonics, and material sciences June 12, 2008

SVASE VC Breakfast Club with George Lauro of Alteon Capital, focus on Semiconductor, MEMS, photonics, and material sciences.

WHAT: VC Breakfast Club with George Lauro of Alteon Capital, focus on Semiconductor, MEMS, photonics, and material sciences

WHEN:Thu June 12th from 8:00am – 9:30am

WHERE:Greenberg Traurig, 1900 University Avenue, 5th Floor, East Palo Alto, CA 94303

URL:www.svase.org/?q=node/1470

CONTACT:Jai Kumar, Program Chair, [email protected] Cell: 408-406-4693

COST: $25 SVASE Members; $39 Affiliates; $49 Non-members. This event is for ENTREPRENEURS ONLY, BY PREREGISTRATION ONLY.

This event is co-sponsored by Greenberg Traurig, www.gtlaw.com.

Alteon Capital Partners
Alteon Capital Partners provides venture capital advisory, corporate development, and seed financing to companies commercializing leading-edge technologies.

Our clients range from large publicly traded technology companies to early-stage technology startups, investment banks, hedge funds, buyout shops, and other venture funds. We are active venture investors in high-potential early-stage companies, primarily in semiconductor, MEMS, photonics, and material sciences.

Alteon Accelerator Fund invests in private companies who are developing radical new products based on cutting-edge technologies. We invest in entrepreneurial teams building businesses with the potential to impact large commercial sectors.

Investment Criteria:
Sectors: We invest across several sectors including electronics, semiconductors, photonics, communications equipment, military and aerospace electronics, avionics, clean technology.
Geography: We will invest anywhere in the U.S.
Stage: We invest across company stages, from formative/concept stage to pre-IPO mezzanine rounds.
Funding: We invest in companies seeking funding ranging from $100K seed rounds to $5M syndicated rounds. We prefer to lead and syndicate rounds, but will follow other leads in deals that we find compelling.
Capital Efficiency: We seek capital-efficient business models and companies requiring under $10M to reach break Cashflow Breakeven.
Successful Leadership: We invest in teams whose leadership has a track record of success.
Large-revenue opportunity: We seek businesses addressing large revenue opportunities, where the directly addressable market is expected to exceed $1 billion in 2010.
Business Validation: We prefer to invest in companies that have some level of validation through relationships with credible customers or partners.

Investment Team:

At Alteon Accelerator, our core competency is to anticipate emerging technology trends, to identify the best positioned teams, and to fund these teams and help them build large successful companies to capitalize on these industry trends. We are a team of experienced Tech Industry investors and entrepreneurs who collectively bring decades of venture investing and technology industry experience. Alteon’s experience ranges from design engineering to marketing, executive management, finance, and investment banking both at the operating and board level. Through more than 20 years of experience investing and building tech businesses, the investment team has developed specialized skills, a broad and deep relationship network, and unique perspective on market and technology trends.

George Lauro
George Lauro, Founding Partner of Alteon Capital Partners, has 25 years of engineering, operating, and venture capital investing experience in the IT, electronics, and semiconductor sectors:

8 years of venture-capital and leveraged buyout experience as a Partner at Wasserstein Perella and Techfarm Ventures.
Over a dozen technology M&A projects, ranging from $5M to $250M in transaction value.
Private equity fundraising projects ranging from $10M to $75M.
Served on the Board of Directors of 15 public and private technology companies. Member of Compensation, Audit, and Corporate Governance Committees.
Senior business development roles at IBM and Motorola.
Band of Angels Deal Screening Committee member.
Holds 23 patents for inventions in global positioning systems (GPS), wireless electronics, radio-frequency identification (RFID), and missile guidance systems.

Prior to founding Alteon Capital, Mr. Lauro was a Partner at two different venture capital funds. He was Managing Director at Techfarm Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that invests in early-stage semiconductor and IT companies. Previously, he was Managing Director at Wasserstein Perella Venture Capital, and was one of two partners managing over $300M across two funds. He opened and managed Wasserstein’s Silicon Valley office and led and syndicated 15 venture-financing rounds. Before joining Wasserstein, Mr. Lauro was Director of Rapid Commercialization at IBM Headquarters, and was one of IBM's senior technology strategists. He launched new businesses ranging from Radio Frequency IC's (RFICs) to Internet Applications and Pervasive Computing. He was Director of Business Development of IBM's Wireless IC, SiGe, and RF BICMOS Products Businesses. At Motorola, he conceived the world's first consumer handheld Global Positioning Product (Traxar GPS), invented new classes of RF transponders, and launched Motorola's businesses in these spaces. He began his career at MIT and Draper Laboratory, where he designed inertial guidance systems for missiles and spacecraft. He also led the development of space vehicle guidance systems at the Astronautics Corporation. He completed a BSEE from Brown, an MBA from Wharton, and graduate work in Astronautics at MIT.

Mr. Lauro has served as a Director on 15 company boards, including:
Peregrine Semiconductor (silicon-on-sapphire mixed-signal ICs)
ChipX (structured ASICs)
SMaL Camera (CMOS imagers acquired by Cypress Semiconductor)
HotRail (terabit switch fabric silicon acquired by Conexant)
SandCraft (MIPS-based superscalar control plane processors acquired by Raza Micro)
Triscend (configurable embedded processors acquired by Xilinx)
Pinyon (Low-cost phased-array/smart-antenna solutions)
Cognigine (OC768 network packet processors acquired by Huawei)
TEAC Aerospace (digital image recorders)
Blaze Networks (optical transceivers acquired by Omron)
Qusion (40G Indium Phosphide modulators)
Publicly traded Software Publishing Corp (NASDAQ: SPCO)
Publicly traded Akeena Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKNS)
Band of Angels Deal Screening Committee member

Official Website: http://www.svase.org/?q=node/1470