Board of Directors

Bob Spinner

Bob joined Sigma in 2003 as Venture Partner and in 2006 became Managing Director. He brings to the firm two decades of high-technology business operational experience. Throughout his career, Bob has served in various operational capacities, including CEO, worldwide sales, technical sales support, software programming, database design, and private and public fundraising. While at Sigma, Bob has helped a number of the firm’s portfolio companies expand operations, build management teams and increase revenues. Bob’s focus areas include business applications, software as a service, ecommerce, IT infrastructure, and Internet Services.

Prior to joining Sigma, Bob was President and CEO of Extensity. During his tenure, Extensity grew from $1 million to $25 million while raising money through private funding and an Initial Public Offering. In March of 2003, Extensity was sold to GEAC. Prior to Extensity, Bob was Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and International Operations at Clarify, a leading provider of integrated CRM solutions. During his tenure at Clarify, he grew the company from $5 million to $140 million in revenue while managing a worldwide organization of 260 professionals. Prior to Clarify, Bob served in expanding roles at Sybase including working as the director of one of Sybase’s most successful regions. Bob has also held technical roles at ADR and Chevron, including sales engineer, programmer and database administrator.

Bob received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

Ammar Hanafi

Ammar H. Hanafi joined Alloy Ventures as a general partner in 2005. At Alloy, he focuses on investments in communications and IT infrastructure, as well as internet-enabled consumer and enterprise applications and services.
Ammar has over a decade of financial and operational management experience in the communications and technology industry. He previously served as vice president of new business ventures at Cisco Systems, where he led new product efforts in the enterprise datacenter market. From 2000 to 2002, he was vice president of corporate business development, and in that capacity, he was responsible for Cisco’s acquisitions, acquisition integration, investment, and joint venture activity on a global basis. He joined Cisco in 1997 as a member of the Corporate Business Development Group. During Ammar’s tenure at Cisco, he helped the company complete over 100 investment and M&A transactions, including 50 successful acquisitions and over $750 million in venture capital investments. Leveraging his deep industry expertise, he helped lead Cisco into a number of major new businesses, including optical networking and integrated voice and data infrastructure and applications. Prior to Cisco, Ammar held leadership positions at PanAmSat Corp., a global satellite services provider, and the investment banking firms of Morgan Stanley and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Ammar received a BS in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University (1988) and an MBA from Stanford University (1995).

Ammar serves on the board of directors of 3Leaf Systems, YouSendIt, Retrevo, Mavenir Systems, Cortina Systems, GigaOM, Teleplace, Infineta Systems and Moxsie. Ammar also serves on the board of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, a non-profit.

Nick Sturiale

Nick Sturiale joined JAFCO in 2009 as a general partner and brings 21 years of venture capital and operating experience. Nick’s accumulated wisdom and "scar tissue" on both sides of the boardroom gives him a grounded insight on the best ways to care, feed and grow entrepreneurial projects.

Prior to JAFCO, Nick was a Managing Director for The Carlyle Group, where he co-managed the firm’s Silicon Valley office. Previously, he was a General Partner at Sevin Rosen Funds, where he spent nearly 10 years serving as an active seed- and early-stage investor in open source, software-as-a-service (SaaS), consumer web-based services, IT infrastructure and security companies. Nick led Sevin Rosen’s early investments in XenSource (acquired by Citrix Systems) and Solidcore Systems (acquired by McAfee) and remains a director on the firm’s current portfolio companies, Splunk and YouSendIt.

Prior to Sevin Rosen, Nick spent 12 years in executive roles at three venture-backed startups: Quorum Software, Candescent Technologies and Timbre Technology. During business school, Nick was founding CEO and a Director of Timbre Technologies (the venture won first prize at the inaugural 1999 UC-Berkeley Business Plan Competition), a Sevin Rosen-backed metrology software company he incubated at the firm which was acquired in 2001 by Tokyo Electron Limited.

Nick holds a Bachelor of Science degree from California State University, Chico and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, where he remains a frequent guest lecturer.

Brian Jacobs

Brian Jacobs is a Founder and General Partner of Emergence. He has over 20 years of venture capital experience, a deep national network and broad experience helping both consumer and business startups become market leaders. Prior to founding Emergence, Brian was an early General Partner at St. Paul Venture Capital. During his 10 years with St. Paul, Brian helped to grow the firm to one of the 15 largest venture investors in the country, while he led the firm’s Silicon Valley investing activities. His prior venture capital experience was at Security Pacific Venture Capital. Brian also worked for the Raychem Corporation, where he developed and marketed advanced software and electronic components. He also has engineering and new product development experience with RCA, Westinghouse, and Polaroid, and he holds several patents.

Brian was named to the Forbes’ Midas List of the top venture capital investors in 2006 and 2007. He is an experienced board member who has served on dozens of public and private boards. He currently serves on the boards of Intacct, YouSendIt, InsideView, Bill.com and DVDPlay.

Brian’s reputation for helping entrepreneurs build market-leading technology-enabled service companies comes from his active involvement in HireRight, WebTV (sold to Microsoft), nQuire Software (sold to Siebel Systems), BigFix, NetPerceptions (NETP), NextCard (NXCD) and others. Brian has backed leading companies in other sectors, including Lexar Media (LEXR), Microchip Technologies (MCHP), and many others.

Brian has a MS and BS in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. and an MBA from Stanford. He is happily married with two children. He enjoys international travel, cycling and cross-country skiing.

Brad Garlinghouse, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer

Brad Garlinghouse joined YouSendIt in May 2012, and is the company’s Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive officer.

Prior to coming to YouSendIt, Brad was President of Consumer Applications and head of AOL’s Silicon Valley operations, where he led the company’s efforts to expand the global reach of its communications products like, AOL Mail and AIM as well as reinvigorate the company’s mobile and social strategy. In addition, Brad was the West Coast lead for AOL Ventures, the company’s venture capital arm.

Previously, Brad was a Senior Advisor at Silver Lake, serving as an in-house counselor on a variety of potential acquisitions. Before that, Brad spent nearly six years at Yahoo!, serving as SVP of Communications and Communities. During his tenure, he also oversaw Front Doors, which included the Yahoo! home page. Brad also oversaw the company’s Flickr photo-sharing service and Yahoo! Groups.

Prior to Yahoo!, Brad was CEO of Dialpad Communications responsible for all aspects of the company’s operations, finance, sales and marketing. Earlier in his career he was also a General Partner at @Ventures, Category Manager of Media Development for @Home Network and Manager at SBC Communications.

Brad holds a BA in economics from the University of Kansas and an MBA from Harvard.

Ranjith Kumaran, Founder

Ranjith Kumaran is the founder of YouSendIt, the trusted global leader in digital content delivery.

Prior to YouSendIt, Kumaran held marketing positions at Verisity Design, a key provider of verification process automation (VPA) solutions, where he managed product marketing for the software tools of Access Systems. Previously, he was the director of sales engineering at Celoxica, a leading provider of C-based design and behavioral synthesis tools, where he built the company’s sales applications and established its engineering team.

Kumaran also was a software systems engineer at Red Hat, one of the largest and most recognized companies dedicated to open-source software and the largest distributor of the GNU/Linux operating system.

Kumaran received a bachelor of engineering degree in computer engineering from McGill University and is an active member of TiE Silicon Valley.