Cherokee Challenge | Cherokee Investment Partners

Amit Singh

Co-Founder and CEO, Spectraforce Technologies, Inc.

Amit Singh co-founded Spectraforce Technologies Inc in 2004. Spectraforce is a global IT consulting and outsourcing services firm with CHQ in Raleigh NC, and 3 global development centers across India. Amit serves as the President and CEO of Spectraforce. Spectraforce has grown at a CAGR of 82% from inception. Spectraforce has made the Triangle Business Journal’s Fast50 list four times in a row and listed thrice as one of the top companies on the Inc 500|5000 list. In the last two years, Diversity 500 also listed Spectraforce as one of the fastest growing diversity companies in the US.

Amit moved from India to United States in 1997 with a large global IT services firm, Syntel Inc, While at Syntel, Amit served as a delivery/solution manager and was involved in consulting, structuring and management of IT deals/projects in an integrated onsite-offshore delivery model that created exceptional value for large fortune 1000 clientele.

Amit currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and the Board of Trustees of the Kenan Institute at the University of North Carolina. Amit serves on the strategic advisory board for KnowledgeWell, a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2005 by a group of MBA graduates inspired to share their business capabilities with the world and to deliver expertise to emerging and under-resourced areas.

Amit also works closely with the entrepreneurial community locally and globally to help entrepreneurs pursue their dreams. He works with various programs at UNC, NC STATE, TYE (The young Indus Entrepreneurs) and is involved in mentoring and coaching budding entrepreneurs, MBAs, undergrads, BSBAs and executive students in developing and launching their businesses and careers.

Amit holds a MBA degree in Finance and Entrepreneurship from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. In 2010, Amit was recognized with an Outstanding Young Alumni Award by UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School at its 12^th annual Alumni Association Awards ceremony.

Bill Brown

Co-Founder, 8 Rivers Capital & Professor of the Practice of Law, Duke Law School

Bill Brown is a Professor at Duke Law School and a co-founder of 8 Rivers Capital, a company that commercializes technologies related to the energy, internet, biomedical device, telecom and automotive industries. A distinguished lawyer with an extensive career in financial services, Brown has held leadership positions at Goldman Sachs & Co., AIG International, and Morgan Stanley. At Duke Law, his teaching focuses on entrepreneurship, business law, business planning, capital markets and corporate finance. He was instrumental in helping put together Duke’s LLM program in Entrepreneurship and the Law.

Brown has authored a number of pieces and is a frequent commentator for a number of organizations, including the BBC, NPR, Bloomberg, The New York Times, NBCTV-17, Forbes.com, MarketWatch, China.com and The Huffington Post.

A 1980 graduate of Duke Law School, Brown was a member of the editorial board of the Duke Law Journal. Brown practiced law in New York City from 1980 to 1989, first at Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine and then at Sidley & Austin, where he was a partner. His practice involved acquisition financing and workouts, project finance, leveraged leasing, Latin America debt refinance, and securities regulation.

Brown began his financial services career in 1990 when he joined the currency and commodity sales group at Goldman Sachs & Co., At Goldman Sachs, he helped grow the foreign exchange business in the asset management community, first in New York and then in London. In 1996, Brown was recruited to AIG International to become global head of sales for currency and fixed income and, one year later, was recruited to Morgan Stanley to become U.S. head of foreign exchange sales. During a part of this period, Brown also ran emerging market and non-dollar debt sales. He then took over listed derivatives as global co-head, managing over 500 members of sales, marketing, information technology, and operations teams in nine locations globally.

Brown is a former member of the Duke University School of Law Board of Visitors and previously served for several years on the School of American Ballet Corporate Advisory Board. He is an arbitrator with the American Arbitration Association. In addition to his Duke Law degree, Brown holds bachelor’s degrees in both biology and political science from MIT in 1977. He is married and has two daughters, one a magazine editor in New York City and the other a Duke undergraduate.

David Jones

Partner, Southern Capitol Ventures

David joined SCV in 2004 and currently serves on the board of BrightContext Corp.

Prior to joining Southern Capitol Ventures, David was with Deloitte Consulting where he managed strategic technology projects for the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.

David was on the boards of SCV portfolio companies ArtusLabs (acquired by PerkinElmer – March 2011) and AVIcode (acquired by Microsoft – Oct 2010). He is co-Founder and former Chief Technology Officer of medical device portal, Orthocopia.com, which provides surgical information to operating room professionals.

David’s background in technology stems from the military where he served as a Naval Aviator flying over 1900 hours in the P-3C Orion.  David served as the Weapons and Operations Officer during two deployments to the Mediterranean theater and North Atlantic and led a Naval Intelligence special projects crew testing cutting-edge technologies for acoustic and non-acoustic sensors and combat mission hardware and software.

David received the Triangle Business Journal’s “40 under 40″ leadership award and is a frequent guest lecturer at UNC Kenan Flagler Business School. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the US Naval Academy, his MS from the University of Virginia and his MBA from UNC Chapel Hill.

Jud Bowman

Founder & CEO, Appia, Inc.

Jud Bowman is the founder and CEO of Appia and has helped grow the company into the largest cross platform, open app marketplace in the world.  In March 2011, the Wall Street Journal ranked Appia #15 on its list of the Top 50 VC-backed companies out of more than 5,700.  Appia’s venture investors include Venrock, DCM’s A-Fund, Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures, BlackBerry Partners Fund, Noro-Moseley Partners & Wakefield Group.

Prior to Appia, Jud co-founded Motricity (Nasdaq: MOTR) in September 1999 and was instrumental in growing the company to more than $100 million in annual revenues and 500 employees globally.  As Motricity’s Chief Technology Officer, Jud was the chief architect of one of the industry’s leading mobile content delivery platforms – a platform that has delivered more than $3 billion of content to mobile phones and was named the 2006 Best Service Delivery Platform by the GSM Association, Best Content Service Delivery Platform by Mobile Entertainment magazine, and honored by Frost & Sullivan as the Premium Mobile Content Platform of the Year in 2005. In June 2010, Motricity successfully completed a $50 million IPO co-led by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and achieved a market capitalization as high as $1.25 billion.

Jud has been named one of the world’s “Top 100 Young Innovators” by MIT’s Technology Review and one of “Tech’s Best Young Entrepreneurs” by BusinessWeek in 2007. He was also recognized as a winner of the Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” award in the Carolinas in 2001 and 2010. Jud is currently on leave from Stanford University, where he was named a President’s Scholar, and is a graduate of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.

In September 2011, Motricity co-founders Jud and Taylor Brockman announced the creation of the Bowman-Brockman Endowment for Entrepreneurship & Advanced Research at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics with an initial gift of $100K.  Jud has served on the Board of Directors of the NCSSM Foundation and the Council for Entrepreneurial Development.  In October 2011, Governor Bev Perdue appointed Jud to the North Carolina Board of Science & Technology.

Kathryn James

Director of Entrepreneurship, Center for Entrepreneurial Development

Kathryn James is the Director of Entrepreneurship at CED, bringing a successful career in High Tech and Greentech startups and management consulting, as well as her own consulting company serving developers in sustainable land development and LEED certification.

After nine years serving in various international technology consulting roles at Accenture,  Kathryn served another five years as an early member of the Entrepreneurial Consulting group of Ernst & Young in San Jose, focused on developing business infrastructure for “gazelle” companies.  Subsequently, Kathryn served in Client Services and Sales management roles in two Silicon Valley startups and as a board member and VP, Sales and Client Services for a software startup in RTP.  Kathryn received a BS in Computer Science from Western Michigan University, and an MLA from North Carolina State University.

Lance Condray

VP, Business Development, Bandwidth

Lance joined Badwidth.com shortly after its founding in early 2001 as CFO.  He served as the financial leader for seven years as the Company grew from startup to $50 million in annual revenue.  In 2008, he led the newly formed subsidiary Bandwidth.com CLEC as CEO during the deployment of a nationwide network covering 48 states and 200+ cities.  The business unit, now branded inetwork, has become the 6th largest provider of telephone based services in the US and provides the infrastructure behind popular services such as Google Voice, TextFree and Skype. Lance graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in Economics.

Miles Palmer

Co-Founder, 8 Rivers Capital

Dr. Miles Palmer is a co-founder of 8 Rivers Capital, a company that commercializes technologies related to the energy, internet, biomedical device, telecom and automotive industries. A distinguished innovator, engineer, and scientist, Dr. Palmer has four patents and over 40 publications in a broad range of fields, including biomedicine, aerospace, optics, communications, transportation, automotive technology, robotics, power, energy, fuels, and environmental chemistry.

After earning both an Electrical Engineering and a Chemistry degree at MIT, Dr. Palmer earned his PhD at the University of California, San Diego. He earned scholarship and academic society honors at both institutions. His bachelor’s thesis at MIT led to advances in artificial skin materials for burn victims, and his PhD thesis included a credible alternative theory for the early evolution of the Earth’s atmosphere that was published in the national press. Dr. Palmer was selected by NASA for final interviews for astronaut selection at Johnson Space Center while in graduate school.

Dr. Palmer joined the Air Force in 1981 to gain experience in flight testing and advanced aerospace technology. He received numerous awards in the Air Force and was nominated for astronaut duty in 1984. He left the Air Force in 1986 and joined SAIC.

Dr. Palmer’s pioneering work in advanced aerospace technology at SAIC has been recognized nationally by his peers, and resulted in a press conference hosted by Sandia National Labs. His work has been cited by Business Week, the Chicago Tribune, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, and other media outlets.

Dr. Palmer served on the MIT Curriculum Committee, The Department of Defense Strategic Defense Initiative Rocket Technology Advisory Panel, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Aerospace Committee on Lasers and Plasmadynamics.

He is married and has two sons, one working on top box office Hollywood movies and one in high school.

Terri Lomax

Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation, and Economic Development, NC State University

Terri Lomax is Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation, and Economic Development at NC State University.  In addition to her responsibilities for federal relations, research development, sponsored programs, regulatory compliance, technology transfer and Centennial Campus partnerships, last year Dr. Lomax led the development of the Springboard Partnership Portal, which acts as a network of networks for coordinating innovation activities across NC State and enhancing collaborations both internally and with external partners.

Before arriving at NC State in 2006, Dr. Lomax was on assignment from Oregon State University to NASA Headquarters in Washington DC, where she directed the space biology program, research and technology development for human space exploration, and served as Senior Policy Analyst and Senior Education Advisor to the NASA Administrator.  In addition to her research program in molecular and systems biology at Oregon State University, she founded and directed the Program for Analysis of Biotechnology Issues and a K-12 outreach program, Science Connections. Among her many honors and accomplishments, Dr. Lomax has been named a Fulbright Fellow, Carnegie Fellow, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Monsanto Research Fellow and Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow. She serves on many boards and is currently the past president of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology and chair of the board of directors for the National Institute for Aerospace.

Tom Darden

Co-Founder & CEO, Cherokee Investment Partners

Tom Darden is the Chief Executive Officer of Cherokee, an environmentally focused investment firm. Cherokee utilizes both private equity and internal venture capital to generate social, environmental and economic returns.  Cherokee Ventures began investing in startup and venture-stage companies in 1984 and has since completed more than 70 investments, using internal capital.  These have spanned several industries and regions, with particular concentrations in health care and environmental technology in the Research Triangle.  Cherokee Funds made its first brownfield investment in 1990 and has since raised five private equity funds focused on brownfield remediation:  $50 million in 1996, $250 million in 1999, $620 million in 2003, $200 million in 2005 and $1.24 billion in 2006.

Darden founded Cherokee through a series of acquisitions in 1984.  From 1981 to 1983, he was a consultant with Bain & Company in Boston. From 1977 to 1978, he worked as an environmental planner for the Korea Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul, where he was a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar. Darden serves on the Board of Governors of the Research Triangle Institute as well as the boards of Crown Financial Ministries, Shaw University and the Environmental Defense Fund. He was Chairman of the Research Triangle Transit Authority and served two terms on the N.C. Board of Transportation.

Darden earned a Masters in Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina, a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina, where he was a Morehead Scholar.  His 1976 undergraduate thesis analyzed the environmental impact of third world development and his 1981 Yale thesis addressed interstate acid rain air pollution.  He and his wife, Jody, have three grown children.

W. Merrette Moore

Founder and Managing Partner, Lookout Capital

Merrette Moore is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lookout Capital, a Raleigh, NC-based growth capital and services firm.  He has over 15 years experience working in venture capital, private equity, investment and commercial banking.  Firms and companies he has worked with include Wachovia, Franklin Street Partners, MCNC, NC IDEA and IDEA Fund Partners.

Over the past decade, Merrette has been involved in multiple private investments, serving as the lead investment representative in many of these deals.  During this time, he was instrumental in developing and refining a structure for the deal sourcing, company due diligence and investment management processes that serves as the model for Lookout.

Merrette received both his undergraduate and MBA degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.