Frank Meehan, Co-Founder & Partner

Frank is the Co-Founder & Partner at SparkLabs Global Ventures and a Partner at SparkLabs, Asia’s premier accelerator based in Seoul.

Frank is also the Co-Founder and CEO at SmartUp.io, a fast-growing Micro-Learning platform used by startups, business schools and corporates. SmartUp has been featured in “Best New Apps” by Apple UK and US in July and October 2015. Frank was selected as part of the 2012 Wired UK Top 100 in tech, and Vanity Fair’s The Next Establishment list 2010.

Previously Frank was with Horizons Ventures (HK), representing them on the boards of Spotify, Siri, Summly, Affectiva, Bitcasa, Fixmo, DoubleTwist, Ginger, Desti and Magisto.

Frank started with Ericsson in 1994 as a coder and troubleshooter, lived in Singapore and HK, and then joined Hutchison Whampoa in 2001 and was responsible for the technical integration of the first 3G(WCDMA) networks around the world, launched under the Three(3) brand in multiple countries in 2003. He then ran the Three Groups’ global handset business, and developed and launched a range of products (Skypephone and INQ1), which pioneered mobile and internet communications.

Jessica Jackley, Venture Partner

Jessica is an entrepreneur and investor. Her work over the last decade has focused on financial inclusion, the sharing economy, and social justice. She is best known as a cofounder of Kiva, the world's first p2p microlending website. Kiva lets internet users lend as little as $25 to individual entrepreneurs, providing them affordable capital to start or expand a small business. Since its founding in October 2005 Kiva has facilitated over $880M in loans worldwide.

Jessica currently teaches Social Entrepreneurship at the Marshall School of Business at USC. She is also an independent consultant on social impact initiatives, and an investor and advisor with the Collaborative Fund. She also recently served as Walt Disney Imagineering's first Entrepreneur in Residence, focusing on projects related to corporate citizenship, the sharing economy, and happiness. Before this, Jessica was a Cofounder and CEO of ProFounder, a pioneering crowdfunding platform for U.S. entrepreneurs which later joined forces with GOOD to create new tools and experiences for their community of creators.

Jessica served from 2010-2012 as a Visiting Practitioner at Stanford’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society. She has taught Entrepreneurial Design for Social Change at Drew University and has lectured around the world. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a 2011 World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader, and serves as an active board member or advisor for several nonprofit organizations including Habitat for Humanity. She holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business , a certificate in Global Leadership and Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, a BA in Philosophy and Political Science from Bucknell University, and honorary PhDs from Centenary College and Quinnipiac University.

Jessica is a trained yoga instructor and avid surfer who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, author Reza Aslan, and their three young sons. Her first book, CLAY WATER BRICK: Finding Inspiration from Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least was published in June 2015 (Penguin Random House).

Bernard Moon, Co-Founder & Partner

Bernard Moon is a Co-founder & Partner at SparkLabs Group. Previously, he was Co-founder & CEO of Vidquik, a web conferencing & sales solutions platform. Bernard was a Managing Director at the Lunsford Group, which is a private investment firm with holdings in real estate, healthcare and other industries. Bernard was Co-founder & VP of Business Development of GoingOn Networks, a social media platform for companies, and also led their product development where BusinessWeek recognized them in their "Best of the Web" list. Previously, Bernard was a Director at iRG, a leading boutique investment bank in Asia, where he focused on TMT companies.

Bernard co-founded a couple of other startups, raised over $50 million in venture capital, and enjoys helping other entrepreneurs. He serves on the advisory boards to Seoul National University's Graduate School of Data Science and Nanyang Technological University's EcoLabs (Centre of Innovation for Energy). Bernard has spoke and lectured about startups and entrepreneurship at Stanford University, Global Entrepreneurship Congress, American Chamber of Commerce in Korea and other organizations.

He is a frequent guest writer to various technology journals, such as VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and ReadWrite, and has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. He was previously selected as one of 8 global judges for EDF's innovation contest (EDF is the world's biggest electricity producer based in France).

He completed a post-graduate fellowship with the Coro Foundation. He received his MPA in Telecom and New Media Policy from Columbia University and a BA in English and Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

John Lee, Co-Founder & Partner

John Lee is Co-founder & Partner at SparkLabs Global Ventures. He is also a Co-founder & Partner at SparkLabs, a startup accelerator in Korea. John is a co- founder & EVP of Corporate Development and Strategy of Hostway. He serves additional responsibilities as CEO of Hostway India. John and his fellow co- founders bootstrapped Hostway into a top 5 web hosting company in the world with over 700 employees.

Hostway is a multinational web hosting company headquartered in Chicago, and serves more than 600,000 customers worldwide. He is currently responsible for overall corporate strategy, strategic alliances, and mergers and acquisitions. Previously, he has held positions in every department of the company, including leading global marketing and sales and overall P&L for North America.

Mr. Lee was born and raised in Korea and immigrated to the United States at age 13. He holds a BA in Biology from the University of Chicago.

Rob DeMillo, Venture Partner

Rob DeMillo is a Venture Partner at SparkLabs Global Ventures. DeMillo has been a successful entrepreneur since the 1990s, having an impressive portfolio of 7 acquisitions/IPOs out of 9 companies. In April of 2019, Rob was awarded the position of Chief Technology Officer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill - the first CTO in the 80+ year history of the influential architecture and design firm. DeMillo came to SOM after his previous company, Nimble Collective, was successfully acquired by Amazon Web Services in early 2019.

Previously, Rob was the CTO of Discovery Digital Networks which he came through via Discovery's acquisition of Revision3. In 2012, DeMillo was named to EContent’s “Fabulous 15: The Top Digital Media Influencers” listed along side of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. DeMillo was the Chief Technology Officer & Co-founder of Transpera, where he was responsible for the technology and operational aspects of the company and serves as the technical liaison to mobile operators, video content providers and ad agencies globally. Prior to Transpera, DeMillo was the CTO for Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising company that was acquired by AOL in 2007. DeMillo also served as SVP of Mobile Technology at VeriSign, following the acquisition by Verisign of m-Qube where DeMillo was Senior Vice President of Engineering and managed over 1,000 engineers.

DeMillo was also Founder and CEO of MediaRush, an early market leader for media distribution within the home, and held technology leadership positions at ATG, a personalization and eCommerce leader, and SynaPix, a computer graphics and video effects company. Before he became a serial entrepreneur, DeMillo was a research scientist/engineer at Lincoln Laboratories, and Jet Propulsion Laboratories before that, applying technology to study and understand topics as diverse as planetary cratering and effects of microbursts on aircraft.

Peter Chang, Venture Partner

Peter Chang is a Venture Partner and technical adviser at SparkLabs Global Ventures. Peter Chang is co-founder and CTO of N3N, an interactive software company that mixes passion, creativity and technology to create new interactive user experience and innovative presentation solutions. He is currently leading the product development of INNOWATCH which is a C4 level command and control center solution. Existing customers include G20 Summit Seoul, Nuclear Summit Seoul, Samsung, Hyundai, Posco, and LG.

Peter has broad experiences in business planning and technology development in telecommunication, IT, CATV, physical security and automobile industries. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of HeyAnita Korea, an interactive voice portal service backed by Softbank. Peter was also co-founder and CTO of ViewPlus, an video-on-demand system for cable and satellite services.

Peter received his masters and bachelor degrees in computer and electrical engineering from POSTECH and Brown University respectively.

Alex Halliday, Venture Partner
VP Product at Bungalow Living

Alex Halliday is a Venture Partner at SparkLabs Global and is a three-time founder, seasoned startup operator, advisor and angel investor with over a decade of experience in early-stage companies. Alex is currently VP Product at Bungalow Living, the leading group living provider in the US.

Prior to Bungalow, Alex led product at MasterClass for 3 years, scaling it from $5m to $100m+ in ARR, working to give anyone access to classes taught by the greatest instructors in the world including Annie Leibovitz, Gordon Ramsay and Malcolm Gladwell.

Prior to MasterClass, Alex was a Director of Product at Teespring and the founder of LawPal, a legal workflow management platform. His first startup was SocialGO, a niche social networking website platform grew to 6m users and made him the youngest ever CEO of a publicly traded company in the UK.

As an active angel investor in Silicon Valley and part of the On Deck Angels, he has invested in startups such as 8 Sleep, Circle.so, Varo, SuperHi, Bungalow, Certn, Outlier and Skillshare.

Brian Behlendorf, Advisor
Executive Director of Hyperledger at the Linux Foundation

Brian is a Managing Director at Mithril Capital Management. He has had stints in startups, government, and international organizations, focusing the positive impact that open technologies can have on society. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and started the Apache Software Foundation. Brian also launched CollabNet, which pioneered open source tools and development methods to transform how organizations write software.

After 8 years leading CollabNet as its CTO, Brian left to work on the 2008 Obama campaign as a technology advisor, and then at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, developing strategies for open access to data and APIs. Later he advised the Department of Health and Human Services on the launch of two Open Source software projects designed to accelerate the adoption of standards for the exchange of electronic health records.

In 2011 he moved to Geneva to start a 20-month stint as CTO at the World Economic Forum, where he rebooted a 30 year old legacy environment with open software and open thinking. Brian is now back in San Francisco with Mithril Capital, and remains an advisor to the WEF. Brian is on the Boards of Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Benetech, and CollabNet. Now he’s on the hunt for great young companies tackling hard problems and disrupting industries.

Greg Badros, Advisor
Founder at Prepared Mind Innovations

Greg Badros earned bachelors degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Duke University. After founding the engineering team at a successful startup, he started graduate school and earned his masters and doctoral degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle. Starting from age 14, Greg has accumulated over twenty research and trade publications and has spoken at numerous conferences internationally. His research interests include software engineering, declarative representations and constraint satisfaction, distributed systems, programming language design and implementation, and mechanism design for online advertising auctions. His Ph.D. work on the Cassowary Constraint Solving algorithm is now an integral part of Apple’s OS X (starting with 10.7 Lion) and iOS.

Since then, he worked at Google for over six years where he was a Sr. Director of Engineering, having led AdSense from 2004-2007 and then the Gmail+ and Google Apps teams from 2007-2009. From mid 2009 to October 2013, Greg worked at Facebook where he was VP Engineering & Products and led numerous teams including Ads, Search, Photos, Messages, Growth, Data Infrastructure and Data Science. After his nearly 4.5 years at Facebook, he founded Prepared Mind Innovations and now acts as an advisor to several startup companies and builds prototypes himself. In his free time, he enjoys tennis, skiing, and home automation.

Jonathan Teo, Advisor
Founder & Managing Director at Binary

Jonathan is co-founder and managing partner of Binary Capital, an early stage consumer technology investment firm with over $300 million under management, based in San Francisco. Previously, Jonathan was managing director at General Catalyst and a Principal at Benchmark, where he led investments in Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Chloe and Isabel. In 2016, Forbes Magazine named Jonathan to its prestigious Midas Brink List.

Before working in venture, Jonathan was an early engineering leader at Google, where he oversaw the company’s global infrastructure expansion and R&D efforts. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Sydney and masters degrees in management science and electrical engineering from Stanford. Born and raised in Singapore, Jonathan is an active advisor to Stanford’s school of medicine and a guest lecturer in its school of engineering.

John Pleasants, Advisor
CEO, Brava

John is a long-time Silicon Valley executive and a veteran of the consumer technology industry. He was CEO of Ticketmaster and its subsidiaries from 1999-2005, as both a public company and a leading division of IAC/InterActiveCorp. After a stint as COO of Electronic Arts, he joined Brava co-founder Dan Yue at Playdom, where John served as CEO and oversaw Playdom's 2010 acquisition by Disney. There, he served as Co-President of Disney Interactive Media Group, spearheading the development and launch of Disney Infinity and achieving the division's first-ever multi-quarter profitability. He joins Brava from Samsung, where he was EVP of Media Solutions.

Maurice Werdegars, Advisor
President and CEO at Western Technology Investment

Maurice Werdegar joined WTI in 2001 and is currently President and CEO at the oldest & largest venture debt firm in the U.S. He led investments in companies including Facebook, Palantir, Youku, Quantcast, Invensense, 3PAR, IronPort, CV Ingenuity, PEAK Surgical, Merced Systems, Oscar Health, StitchFix, PlayStudios, and Volcano Technologies.

His background includes positions as a Venture Partner at Outlook Ventures, an early stage venture firm, and Chief Investment Officer at MetaMarkets, an online mutual fund company. Mr. Werdegar also founded and served as CEO of Left at Albuquerque, a venture-backed chain of restaurants. Prior to business school, Mr. Werdegar worked in corporate finance at Robertson Stephens. Mr. Werdegar holds both a BA and MBA from Stanford University.

Yoky Matsuoka, Advisor
Chief Technology Officer at Nest

Yoky Matsuoka joined Google [x] as one of the three founding members before taking her position as Chief Technology Officer at Nest. Yoky grew up assuming she would become a professional tennis player.

One thing led to another, and she ended up with a B.S. from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from MIT in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Neuroscience. Subsequently, she became a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and later at the University of Washington developing robotic devices for rehabilitating and assisting the human body and brain. This work led her to the MacArthur Award and being named one of “The Brilliant Ten” by Popular Science Magazine and one of the “Top 10 Women to Watch in 2010” by Barbie.

Recent (2015) honors include "The Next List" by Wired Magazine and The Excellence in Achievement Award from UC Berkeley. She is happy to have four children under age 10 and most of all enjoys cheering them on from the sidelines of their extracurricular activities.

Seong K. Ohm, Advisor
Sr. Vice President, Merchandise Business Services at Sam`s Club

Seong assumed the responsibility of leading Merchandise Business Services for Sam’s Club in February 2013. Her primary focus will be to develop merchandise service solutions for the 2nd largest warehouse club in the US which includes Financial Services and Fuel. Seong brings 25 years of experience from both retail and suppliers where 10 years have been with Walmart Stores Inc. Seong is also the Chair for the Asian Pacific Officer Caucus.

Prior to this assignment, Seong was responsible for leading the Entertainment SBU for Walmart US, which includes CE, Media and Wireless and Photo businesses. She led the team to gain market share in all categories and was awarded the Retailer of the Year for excelling in TVs, Content and Digital. Prior to this assignment, Seong was the SVP of Global Merchandising Center for Home/Hardlines/Entertainment/Toys/Seasonals businesses where she was responsible for leading our sourcing, packaging and technical areas.

Seong spent 20 months in Japan as the SVP/GMM of General Merchandise and Consumables business at Walmart Japan/ Seiyu for its 386 stores. Seong focused on transforming their General Merchandise business during her tenure while implementing EDLP. Before Japan, she spent 5 ½ years with Sam’s Club as the Sr. VP/GMM of Electronics and Office Products and DMM of Electronics. Under her leadership, Sam’s Club expanded national branded products and increased quality of products. Seong also worked at AT&T and Lucent Technologies in product management, sales operations, market intelligence and marketing. She also spent 8 years with General Electric and Thomson Consumer Electronics in various functions in Marketing.

Seong was named 15 Top Innovative Women in Business by Pink Magazine and also top 100 MBAs by the Diversity Magazine. She has a BS in Neuroscience and a MBA in Finance and Marketing from University of Rochester, and she was the alumni scholar for University of Rochester. Seong was born in South Korea and is married to Mr. Michael Ohm. They have two children, Jessica and Nicholas.