Ben Smith

Mr. Benjamin Smith serves as Advisor and Limited Partner at Cendana Capital. He co-founded and served as a Board Member at Spoke Software. He serves as an Advisor at Wild Wood Ventures. He serves as an Advisor at Parade Ventures. He served as Venture Partner at Accelerator Ventures. Before joining Accelerator Ventures, he served as President of Reply Media which acquired MerchantCircle where he had been a cofounder and CEO. He cofounded MerchantCircle and incubated it at Rustic Canyon Partners while he was an Entrepreneur in Residence with Alex Lloyd. Before co-founding MerchantCircle, he was the SVP of Corporate Development at Borland through four acquisitions and drove the spinoff of their subsidiary, CodeGear, as their CEO through the separation and startup. Additionally, he co-founded the company Spoke and is still serving on its board. He also serves as a Board Member & Chairman of the Compensation Committee at Glu Mobile. He is a long-time angel investor with over 40 early-stage investments, often alongside Accelerator, and is an LP at several venture funds. He previously served in the White House as the Senior Advisor for Strategy and Planning to the Secretary of Transportation, assisting with the creation of the Transportation Security Administration after 9-11. Among his other accomplishments, he was a Vice President in Electronic Data System's A.T. Kearney management consulting subsidiary, leading the West Coast operations of the Kearney/EDS Venture Development Group, was one of the youngest partners in the history of the firm, and was named one of the 25 most influential strategy consultants in 2002. As a Partner in the High Technology and Strategy Practices at A.T. Kearney, he advised leading technology companies on business, acquisition, investment, and marketing strategies. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Davis, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. [Source: Public Company Filing]