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Team
Sweetwater's professionals have a deep range of technology industry and investment experiences. We have raised capital and structured acquisitions and divestitures as both company executives and as outside investors. Understanding both perspectives intimately helps our professionals structure and complete transactions more successfully.
Sweetwater's partners have all held senior executive positions in companies at various stages of their growth cycle. This experience allows us to rapidly offer meaningful strategic and operational advice to our portfolio companies.
Christopher S. Dean, Founder, Principal
Advisor
Jonathan
Christensen, Founder, Principal Advisor
Alan
Duric, Founder, Principal Advisor
Espen
Fjogstad, Founder, Industry Advisor
Aril
Resen, Founder, Principal Advisor
Detailed Biographies:
Christopher S. Dean, Founder, Managing Partner
Christopher has more than 20 years of general management, business development and marketing experience
in a range of technology sectors and finance. Christopher has extensive experience positioning
and selling growth businesses to key investors, partners and buyers.
For the last 4 years he has held the position of Senior Vice President of Business Development
at FaceTime Communications. FaceTime Communications is the leading provider of security and compliance
solutions for “Greynets”, including Instant Messaging, Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Skype and
Spyware in the enterprise. FaceTime’s solutions are used by several hundred large enterprises
including 8 of the top 10 US banks. FaceTime is funded by Bank America Venture Partners, Sutter
Hill and JK&B Capital.
Prior to FaceTime Christopher was running Dean Consulting, an independent consulting practice focused on marketing, strategy, business development where he consulted to Adobe Systems, Oracle, Placeware, Justsystems, Archimedes Technology Group, Reuters and many others.
Christopher was the Senior Vice
President of Business Development of Epoch Partners, a boutique technology focused investment
bank in San Francisco which was sold to Goldman Sachs in July 2001 for $200 million. Epoch was
funded by Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, Trident, Reuters, Charles Schwab, TD Waterhouse and Ameritrade.
Prior to Epoch he was the Executive Vice President, e-Commerce Services, at SmartAge.com (later
B2SB Technologies), a small business-focused B2B portal. The 40+ deals he negotiated were responsible
for generating over 50% of all of SmartAge’s revenues and 90%+ of its membership base. SmartAge
was funded by Accel, Softbank Capital, Michael Dell, Ben Rosen, Vint Cerf and Integral Partners.
Christopher was the Vice President
of Marketing at Worlds, Inc., an early Internet software start-up spun out from Knowledge Adventure
by Bill Gross. Worlds was funded by Visa, Pearson plc., Tandem Computers, Nissho Iwai and Toppan
Printing, and Olivetti. Worlds was sold to Datastream Corporation in 1997.
Before Worlds, Christopher was a Senior Consultant at Regis McKenna, Inc, a high technology management
consulting firm, where he primarily consulted to IBM and Apple.
In 1989 Christopher co-founded
The Old Detroit Brewing Company, Inc. a mid-western microbrewery and was appointed the President
and CEO. Old Detroit was sold to the Frankenmuth Brewery, Inc. in 1991.
Prior to Old Detroit, Christopher was an Associate at Venture Funding, Ltd. a venture investor
focused in the biotechnology and medical technology sectors.
Christopher holds an MBA from
the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a B.A. in Economics from Vassar College.
Jonathan Christensen,
Founder, Principal Advisor
Jonathan Christensen is a Senior Director at Skype. Previously he was President and CEO of Camino Networks; a voice over IP start-up building unique solutions for high quality speech processing, coding, and transmission for the next generation of mobile IP based networks. Camino Networks was sold to Skype/Ebay in 2006. The company was founded on the vision that through the application of its advanced signal processing expertise, voice communications in the next generation mobile internet could be richer and more natural sounding than any telecommunications experience available today. Jonathan has an excellent sense for what is next in Internet communications. Before running his first startup, Jonathan accumulated more than a decade of experience shaping strategy for internet based businesses inside of leading organizations such as Microsoft and Time Warner.
For the two years prior to Camino
Networks, Jonathan was the Chief Technology Officer and V.P. of Products at FaceTime Communications.
At Microsoft, Jonathan lead program management for the company’s Real Time Communications
group. In 1998 he began working with industry leaders and Microsoft colleagues to develop a new
strategy to change the communications and collaboration landscape. This was at a time when the
incumbent voice vendors were offering only expensive proprietary systems while Microsoft’s
own resource investments in real time communications weren’t focused and scattered across
multiple projects with no central theme or strategic vision. At the time Microsoft had delivered
three versions of NetMeeting, three versions of its Telephony Application Programming Interface
(TAPI), and had just introduced a proprietary enterprise Instant Messaging product. Despite large
ongoing investments, revenue was scarce and industry impact was minimal. A small group, including
Jonathan, was instrumental in starting a new product initiative based on the then nascent Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP). Based on these early efforts, Microsoft would eventually take a leading
although sadly temporary stance in the industry to push open internet based standards for communications.
Nonetheless the group was responsible for the creation of the first broadly distributed SIP framework
for high quality, PC based, multi-modal IP communications. In August of 2001 the group catalyzed
the industry movement to SIP and standards based multimodal communications by delivering its SIP
based voice and video solution in every copy of Windows XP. Today SIP is supported by all of the
incumbent communications vendors and SIP is used to establish billions of voice minutes every
month.
Jonathan was also Group Program Manager for the RTC team in 2003 when the team delivered the first generation of SIP based enterprise communications server products to the market (Live Communications Server). Jonathan also worked on the Netshow team (now called Windows Media), and has a passion for internet based media distribution systems. He once built a working system for multicast distribution of MP3 encoded music streaming over un-used satellite transmission bandwidth. Witnessing the incredible growth of RSS based media distribution, he is excited to be participating in the next phase of the Internet media and communications revolution. Jonathan also held positions leading strategy and planning for voice services in MSN and the now forgotten Netdocs group (an enormous internal startup effort that built a universal communications experience that could be offered on demand in real time via the web AJAX++) .
Prior to joining Microsoft Corporation, Jonathan held management positions at Time Warner, where he was drove commercial Internet services in the first days of the World Wide Web. Through 1996 and 1997 Jonathan was instrumental in bringing to market the first generation of low cost consumer broadband services at Time Warner Cable.
Jonathan has a Master of Business Administration from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a Bachelor of Arts in Law and Society from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Alan Duric, Founder, Principal Advisor
Alan is an early pioneer of VoIP and co-author and/or contributor to number of IETF, ETSI and
ITU standards.
Alan is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Telio. Telio is the largest and fastest growing access independent VoIP provider in Europe. The company is headquartered in Oslo, Norway. In addition to offering services to end customers, Telio is also offering Telio Voice Production System (TVPS) on a white label basis for European ISPs. Telio aims to at all times offer the most advanced multimodal broadband communications platform in Europe.
Alan was one of the founders of Camino Networks, which was sold to Skype/Ebay in 2006.
Prior to Telio, Alan was a developer
and senior systems architect at Ericsson. Prior to Erisson Alan was Senior Systems Architect at
Global IP Sound.
Alan is a director of Sipfoundry.org an advisor to CounterPath (XTEN´s) and Kayote.
Alan is on the Electrotecnical faculty of Unversity of Zagreb with a MSc EE.
Espen Fjogstad, Founder, Industry Advisor
Espen Fjogstad has worked with a range of technology companies as an investor and entrepreneur, some of which he co-founded. In 1999 he co-founded Global IP Sound, a company best known for delivering the voice technology behind Skype.
Espen was one of the founders of Camino Networks, which was sold to Skype/Ebay in 2006.
In 2003 he co-founded Telio. Since founding Telio, he has been serving as Telio’s CEO and now Chairman. In less than one year, Telio became Europe’s largest and fastest growing access independent VoIP provider, moving in periods nearly 1% of the Norwegian broadband population to its service every month.
Espen was the CEO of Odin Reservoir
Software and Services and the Deputy Managing Director of Smedvig Technologies (now : Roxar ASA)
Prior to Smedvig, Espen was a Consultant at McKinsey and Company.
Espen is a board member of Cyviz AS, Smartseal AS and Applied Plasma Physics.
Espen has a MSc from NTH and a MBA from INSEAD
Aril Resen, Founder, Principal Advisor
Aril was a Founder and is the CFO and a Director of Telio. Telio is the largest and fastest growing
access independent VoIP provider in Europe.
Aril was one of the founders of
Camino Networks, which was sold to Skype/Ebay in 2006.
Prior to Telio, Aril was on the derivative floor of San Francisco Stock Exchange and was a Stockbroker
for Alfred Berg Norge AS. Aril is an active angel investor and sits on numerous boards.
Aril holds an MBA for San Francisco State University.