Team

Founded in 2001 and backed by Clearstone Venture Partners and Leapfrog Ventures, Vast.com has brought together a team of experienced Internet executives from Epinions, Zillow, Trilogy, Paypal, and CoreMetrics. Vast.com is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Belgrade, Serbia.

Management team:

• Kevin Laws - CEO
• John Price - President
• Ben Clark - Vice President and General Manager, Real Estate
• Komal Sethi - CTO
• Ben Folk-Rittenhouse - Vice President of Engineering

Board of Directors:

• Jim Armstrong - Managing Director, Clearstone Partners
• Peter Rip - Venture Partner, Leapfrog Ventures
• Naval Ravikant - Chairman, Vast.com
• Kevin Laws - CEO, Vast.com

Management Team

Kevin Laws - Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Kevin is the CEO of Vast.com. Before Vast.com, Kevin served as a Principal at PacRim Venture Partners with responsibility for sourcing and evaluating potential software investments. Prior to PacRim, Kevin Laws was vice president of products at Epinions, where he helped build the company into the top consumer and review website. Kevin also worked as a consultant in the Communications, Media & Technology Group at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and as Software Development Manager for Computer Sciences Corporation's offices in Heidelberg, Germany, where he oversaw Development of several major projects, including one of the first large-scale web-based Intranets in 1993. Kevin holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Dickinson College, an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and an M.A. in International Relations from Boston University.

John Price - President

John drives business development and partnerships for Vast.com, along with overseeing the marketing and sales departments. Prior to Vast, John served as the vice president of sales and business development at BetweenMarkets where he was responsible for the development of the indirect channel and M&A activity. Before BetweenMarkets, John spent 11 years as vice president of marketing and business development at enterprise software company Trilogy, Inc, where he was critical to the company's growth from $0 to $250 million in revenue. Previously, John was a director of technical marketing at Neuron Data and an AI associate at Shell Oil. John holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Ben Clark - Vice President and General Manager

Ben Clark serves as the vice president and general manager of real estate for Vast.com. Prior to Vast.com, Clark served as the director of partner relations and state regulatory compliance at Zillow, a leading real estate website. Prior to joining Zillow, Ben was the COO of nationally recognized Internet based residential brokerage, eRealty, Inc. Prior to entering the online residential real estate industry in 1999, Ben managed commercial real estate assets, including a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, the 1.2 million square foot headquarters of the National Weather Service and a major mixed use development in Washington DC's central business district known as Lafayette Center. Ben resides in Northern Virginia with his wife and three children.

Komal Sethi - Chief Technology Officer

Komal serves as CTO of Vast.com. Prior to Vast.com, Komal was vice president of development and co-founder of Deersoft, an anti-spam software company that commercialized the leading anti-spam solution SpamAssassin, later acquired by Network Associates. Prior to Deersoft, Komal held an entrepreneur-in-residence position at Powershift Ventures. Previously, Komal was the director of development for hosted-CRM company Agillion and developer for Trilogy, Inc. Komal holds a BS and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Ben Folk-Rittenhouse - Vice President of Engineering

Ben Folk-Rittenhouse is vice president of engineering at Vast.com. Prior to joining Vast.com Ben managed the engineering team at Coremetrics as it grew from 10 engineers to a distributed team totaling 38 engineers in Austin, San Mateo, and Lviv, Ukraine. Before transitioning to full time management Ben was the architect for the Coremetrics Data Acquisition system, which has scaled to handle over 10 times the originally specified data volume without significant redesign. Ben has held engineering and leadership roles at CoAgent, Fisheye, and Trilogy Software. Ben has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Board of Directors

Jim Armstrong - Managing Director, Clearstone Venture Partners

Jim's work at Clearstone is focused on information technology investments, with particular interest in consumer Internet, application software and Internet enabled business processes. In each of the last four years, Jim was recognized as one of the top 100 Venture Capitalists in the United States by Forbes Magazine in its annual Midas List. Jim joined Clearstone Venture Partners in 1998 from Austin Ventures, a leading venture fund, where he spent three years supporting investments in a variety of early stage companies. Jim also worked with idealab, the incubator, helping to guide and fund a variety of early Internet companies. Jim led Clearstone's current investments Internet companies SupplyFrame, Internet Brands (formerly CarsDirect), Vast, and LeisureLink, and Software companies Integrien, Siderean and Composite. Jim actively represented Clearstone's investment in former portfolio companies Comet Systems (acquired by Miva), PayPal (acquired by eBay as a public company), United Online (NASDAQ: UNTD), Jump Networks (acquired by Microsoft) and TriVida (acquired by BeFree). Jim holds a BA in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles and also holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Peter Rip - Venture Partner, Leapfrog Ventures

Peter is a Venture Partner at Leapfrog Ventures and a General Partner at Crosslink Capital. Peter focuses on Internet, software, and services, bringing over 25 years of experience as a successful entrepreneur, venture investor, and institutional investor. He has focused exclusively on early stage technology companies. Before becoming a venture investor, Peter co-founded Silicon Compiler Systems, a major IC design automation software company acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1991. He began venture investing in 1992. He has specialized in investing in early stage companies, several of which have been acquired by AOL, CA, HP, Microsoft and others. Prior to joining Crosslink, Peter was a Managing Director at Leapfrog Ventures and the Managing Director of Knight Ridder Ventures. Peter holds a BA from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Marketing from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Naval Ravikant - Chairman, Vast.com

Naval Ravikant is the chairman of Vast.com and previously founded Genoa Corporation (acquired by Finisar) and Epinions (which went public as part of Shopping.com). Previously, he was a venture partner at August Capital and led investments in Scintera, Neopath, Technorati, Microdisplay, DeviceScape, and Mimosa. Startups Naval has helped and advised in areas ranging from founding to product design to fundraising include iPivot (sold to Intel), Intrinsic Graphics, Andale, XFire (sold to Viacom), HedgeStreet, Engage, Photo.net, LoyaltyLab, Jaman, Hive7, Dulance (sold to Google), and Bix (sold to Yahoo!). Naval currently manages a small fund focused on early-stage social media investments and co-authors Venturehacks.com.