Bill Elkus conceived the Clearstone Venture Partners concept in 1997 and has been a Managing Member of its General Partners since their inception. In each of 2004, 2005 and 2006, Bill was recognized as one of the top 100 Venture Capitalists in the United States by Forbes Magazine in its annual Midas List.

His current & past board memberships and observer roles include United Online (NASD: UNTD), Overture (acquired by Yahoo! in 2003), PayPal.com (acquired by eBay in 2002), the Chronicle Publishing Company (The San Francisco Chronicle and KRON television), Presto Services, Cooking.com and WeddingChannel.com (acquired by The Knot in 2006).

Bill is a 1977 graduate of Harvard Law School (JD, magna cum laude) and a 1973 graduate of MIT, where he earned a MS in Management from Sloan School of Management and a BS in Mathematics.

Bill began his career at the Sand Hill Road office of the Boston Consulting Group in 1977. He spent five years as a strategic planning consultant at BCG offices in Menlo Park, Chicago and Munich covering a wide variety of industries, including semiconductors, magnetic recording media, and publications databases.

From 1982 through 1993, Bill was full-time as President of Nathan Todd & Company, an investment advisory firm which specialized in providing wealth management services and in representing private family fortunes. As part of this work, Bill co-founded five independently managed investment partnerships with over $600 million under management in the areas of securities trading, real estate and merchant banking. He was also active in venture capital, including investments in traditional funds, co-investments with those funds, and direct venture investments.

In addition to his work at Nathan Todd & Company, from 1994 through 1997, Bill was the co-founder and a Managing Director of a boutique Los Angeles merchant bank affiliated with Jefferies & Company, Inc.

A successful and experienced early stage venture investor across a variety of enterprise and consumer facing technology companies, Jim has established himself as a leading investor based in Southern California. Since joining Clearstone early in its formation, Jim has applied his experience and industry contacts to help Clearstone companies deliver a strong record of venture performance. Jim's work at Clearstone is focused on information technology investments, with particular interest in consumer internet, application software and internet enabled business processes. Jim has been recognized as one of the top 50 Venture Capitalists in the United States by Forbes Magazine.

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, in the late 90’s, helping to guide and fund a variety of early Internet companies.

Jim led Clearstone’s current investments in Internet companies SupplyFrame, Internet Brands (NASDAQ: INET), Vast, Six Degrees Games, and LeisureLink, as well as in Enterprise Software companies Integrien and Composite. Jim actively represented Clearstone's early stage investments 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 McCombs School at the University of Texas at Austin.

You can follow Jim’s thoughts on Internet trends, investing and venture capital at www.socalvc.blogspot.com

Currently Steven has joined one of his favorite Clearstone companies, Apture, as VP of Operations. Before defecting (temporarily we hope) to the darkside, Steven was a member of the Clearstone investment team with expertise in online media & monetization, mobile communications, and internet infrastructure. Steven had incubation and board roles with portfolio companies Vast, The Rubicon Project, ThisNext, Nokeena Networks, SupplyFrame, LeisureLink and SoonR.?

Prior to Clearstone Steven interned at Redpoint Ventures, where he identified early-stage investment opportunities in Southern California. Steven gained valuable operating experience at Yahoo/Overture, where he managed product and business development initiatives for their contextual advertising and local search businesses.??

Steven received his BS in Applied Physics from Yale University , graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Steven also holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he was a Venture Fellow and Dean's Scholar.

Rahul formed our India investment advisory, Clearstone Venture Advisors, in 2005. Based in Mumbai, he is responsible for identifying early stage companies that will capitalize on the growth in domestic consumer services including wireless, media, entertainment, retail, travel and finance. Having recently relocated to India from Silicon Valley, he has leveraged his cross-border operating experience and industry relationships to lay the foundation for our investments in India.

Prior to joining Clearstone, Rahul was Area Director Asia-Pacific at Sonim Technologies, a wireless start-up in San Mateo. Having joined Sonim during its inception, he was responsible for the company's global marketing and sales initiatives including key markets like China and India. Before Sonim Technologies, he managed strategic alliances and partnerships at Airflash, a location based services provider that was acquired by the location based services market leader Webraska in 2001.

Prior to moving to the US, Rahul helped launch India's first mobile operator 'Orange', a subsidiary of Hutchison Telecom. During his time at Orange in the mid-nineties, he served in several marketing management functions at Orange including leading the team responsible for customer acquisition and retention programs in India as well as developing entry and growth strategies for Orange in Singapore and Israel.

Rahul earned an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School at Northwestern University in Illinois.

Erik has been a venture capitalist for 12 years and held operating roles with technology companies for the prior 6 years.  He began in venture as an Associate with Mayfield Fund, where he focused on software and Internet investing.  Erik has led investments in Interwoven (IWOV), NetBoost (acquired by Intel), CityAuction (acquired by InterActive Corp), Eve.com (acquired by LVMH), Neomar (acquired by Good Technology), and Good Technology (acquired by Motorola).

Prior to his venture career, Erik held management positions with Texas Instruments and Motorola, developing and marketing semiconductors and software. His roles included leading a European product launch as a Product Manager based in France, serving as distribution specialist in charge of pricing decisions for $180 million of distribution sales in western U.S., and direct sales management responsibility for $20 million of annual revenue.

Erik is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and guest lecturer at Stanford Business School, Peking University, and Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management.  He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering with high honors from Iowa State University and an MBA from Stanford University.

Erik spends much of the year living in Beijing, China.  He speaks and reads Mandarin and is personally engaged in several public and private initiatives there including semiconductor development, stem cell-based biotechnology, for-profit education, and clean air initiatives.

Erik represents Clearstone’s interests with regard to investments in Centrata, Good Technology, and Syndera Corp.

Sumant joined Clearstone Venture Partners in 2000. He spends his time and energy helping visionary entrepreneurs build companies around large markets from the ground up. He represents Clearstone on the boards of The Rubicon Project, DiVitas Networks, Geodelic (observer), Billdesk (India), Games2win (India), Apture and ThisNext. Some of the past investments where he worked closely with the founding teams and helped incubate the ideas are Kazeon Systems (sold to EMC), Mimosa Systems (sold to Iron Mountain) and Ankeena Networks (sold to Juniper Networks). Sumant initiated and is responsible for Clearstone's investment activities in India.

Prior to Clearstone, Sumant spent more than eight years as an entrepreneur involved in starting companies both in India and the United States. He has been part of creating companies in the online media world, infrastructure technologies and clean energy.

Sumant has an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. He is a Charter Member of TiE.

Vish joined Clearstone in March 2002 with over 30 years of leadership and management experience in the high tech industry including software, Internet, networking and telecommunications. He is a founder and served as a board member of Telera, a cutting edge voice web infrastructure company which was sold to Alcatel for $140 million in 2002. Vish was also co-founder of Excelan (1983), which was funded with $7.3 million in venture capital, went public in 1987, sold for $225 million in 1989 and went on to contribute $1 billion to Novell’s revenue in subsequent years.

Vish prides himself in being a mentor capitalist who sits or has sat on boards of many venture-backed companies such as Abeama, Cofix, Onjibe, PostMedia Group, Quantros, Ramp Networks (sold to Nokia), SloMedia, Verano, and Xalted IP Networks. His prior experience includes founding VP of Operations of Excelan and VP Novell and EVP of iPlanet (a unit of Sun Microsystems and AOL), and CEO of four start-ups: Info-Objects, Mindworks, IntelliMatch and Ace Software.

Vish holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Institute of Technology at Benares Hindu University, an MS in Electrical Engineering from North Dakota State University and MBA work from the University of Minnesota. He is a very active Director and Charter Member of TiE who has dedicated himself to the growth of the organization since its inception.

Vish's focus at Clearstone is deal flow, syndicate networking, portfolio company support and executive coaching. His vast network in Silicon Valley, extended globally through TiE, is an invaluable asset to entrepreneurs and to us. Vish serves on the board of Novariant (formerly IntegriNautics).

Dana Moraly joined Clearstone Venture Partners in 1999 from Trust Company of the West ("TCW") where she was responsible for overseeing the finance and operations of seven international private equity funds. Prior to joining TCW, Dana spent six years with Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers) as a Senior Manager in their merger & acquisition practice where she consulted on numerous transactions working with financial and strategic buyers. Dana also spent three years as a Senior Auditor with Deloitte & Touche.

Dana earned her MBA with honors from the Anderson School at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dana received her BA, cum laude, in Economics and Business from the University of California at Los Angeles.

In 1987, she was awarded the Elijah Watt Sells award for her performance on the CPA exam. Dana was recently selected to join the National Venture Capital Association's CFO Task Force.

Anil Patel joined Clearstone Venture Partners in May 2006. Anil brings a combination of technology, legal and venture capital investment experience to his current role at Clearstone. He is focused on helping companies across the portfolio with a special expertise on companies in communications, software and technology-enabled services.

Prior to Clearstone, Anil was at Azure Capital Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, where he focused on early-stage investments in a variety of technology-driven companies, ranging from semiconductors to communications systems to consumer software. Some of the portfolio companies for which Anil was a board observer or with which he has worked in the past include: Catena Networks (acquired by Ciena), Knowledge Adventure, Limbo, Morphics (acquired by Infineon), Personeta, Resonext (acquired by RF Micro Devices), and Terawave.

Prior to his venture career, Anil was an attorney at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. At WSGR, he advised privately-and publicly-held technology companies in corporate and securities law, including public equity offerings, strategic partnerships and minority investments, mergers and acquisitions and venture capital financings. Some of the corporate clients Anil represented included Convergys, Diamond Multimedia Systems, Infosys, Network Associates (McAfee), Proxim, Micro Linear, Veo Systems (acquired by CommerceOne) and Xircom. Anil also represented a variety of venture funds and investment banks in public and private securities offerings.

Earlier in his career, Anil worked as a software developer and systems consultant at Information Management Consultants Inc. in McLean, Virginia, where he designed and implemented financial database and imaging systems for federal government clients, including the Department of Defense and the Department of State.

Anil holds A.B. degrees in Economics and Philosophy from Stanford University, a M.B.A. from Columbia Business School, and a J.D. from the Columbia University School of Law.

William Quigley joined Clearstone Venture Partners shortly after its formation and concentrates on its Internet and communications related investments.   During his first two-and-a-half years with the firm, he worked out of the idealab! incubator and helped launch and lead investments in many idealab! backed companies including Homepage.com, FreePC, FreeMusic.com and Paymybills.com.   A number of his early-stage investments have gone public, including MP3.com, Tickets.com, Emusic and PeopleSupport and several have been acquired including InternetConnect (sold to Covad) and Phasebridge (sold to Emcore).

William’s current portfolio reflects his belief in the enormous opportunity in the wireless consumer and enterprise markets (AOptix, SoonR, Meru Networks, Novariant).   He is also focused on emerging companies offering managed services in the enterprise and consumer sectors (Communicado, Spock Networks).   William is a member of the board of directors of AOptix Technologies, Communicado, Meru Networks, Novariant, SoonR and Spock.com.

William joined Clearstone from Mid-Atlantic Venture Funds, where he invested in early- stage communications companies targeting the software, equipment and service sectors. At MAVF, he was responsible for investments in Integrated Chipware, a real time embedded OS developer, Wisor Telecom, an OSS vendor to telecom service providers and NexTone Communications, a manufacturer of voice over IP equipment.

Prior to MAVF, William spent seven years in a variety of business planning and operational roles at The Walt Disney Company. His tenure at Disney included finance roles at EuroDisney, the Disney Store retail chain and Disney's consumer products merchandise licensing division.   He oversaw all finance and business planning activities for Disney’s licensing business unit, the world’s largest consumer products licensor.   William also co-managed Disney's merchant banking group where he negotiated and structured equity positions in the company's strategic licensees.

Prior to Disney, William was a Senior Consultant with Arthur Andersen's Financial Services Group where he developed financial and business strategies for a wide range of companies in the media and communications and financial services industries.

William is on the board of DealMaker LA, a Los Angeles based organization promoting entrepreneurial activities in Southern California. 

William received his MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School, and holds a BS in Accounting, with honors, from the University of Southern California. He is a CPA and a Kauffman Fellow.

David Stern is a Venture Partner at Clearstone where he focuses on developing early stage investment opportunities at the intersection of consumer technology and media.

Prior to Clearstone, David was President of M Networks, an educational media company focused on providing practical business technology education to small businesses and entrepreneurs. Previous to founding M Networks, David was a licensing lawyer, a business development executive at Universal Studios, an entrepreneur at the idealab! family of companies, and has held management positions at leading health care software companies Veranto and Model N.

David is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of San Diego School of Law.  His active board roles include Clearstone portfolio companies Apture, Geodelic Systems, Rubicon Project and SoonR.

Prabakar Sundarrajan is responsible for driving Citrix Application Networking Group’s technology vision, product strategy and architecture. Prabakar joined Citrix via the acquisition of NetScaler Inc, where he served as CTO and EVP of Strategic Planning and Corporate Development.

Prior to joining Netscaler, Prabakar was Senior Vice President of Technology for Exodus Communications. Prabakar was a member of the Exodus founding team and led the strategy, development and delivery of Exodus managed services from its inception.

Prabakar has nearly 25 years of industry experience in a variety of engineering, marketing and executive positions, including extensive experience in Internet, client/server and on-line transaction processing environments at Exodus, IBM/Transarc, HP, Intel and HaL. Prabakar holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Prabakar serves on the board of directors and/or technical advisory board of several companies. He is a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).