Katrin Burt

Katrin is a partner on the technology team at Intersouth Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm. She joined Intersouth from London-based HSBC, one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world. At HSBC she held a series of positions, serving as a foreign exchange trader in London, managing portfolios of treasury products and equities in Tokyo and managing the annual operating plan for the bank’s Global Markets Europe Division in London.

Katrin serves on the board and executive committee of the Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) and is a director of the North Carolina Center of Innovation for Nanobiotechnology. She teaches several classes on venture capital at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Katrin holds a B.A. from Oxford University, an M.B.A. from Duke University and an M.S. in Microsystems and Nanotechnology from Cranfield University.

Mitch Mumma

Mitch is a partner with Intersouth Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm, where he has primary responsibility for the firm’s technology portfolio. He has served on the boards of more than 20 private companies for Intersouth over the last two decades.

Mitch serves on the board of directors of NCTA and is a director and former chairman of the board of CED. He is a member of the advisory board of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and serves on the advisory board for N.C. State University’s Engineering Entrepreneurs Program. In addition, he has served as a mentor to the Kauffman Foundation’s Kauffman Venture Fellows Program. He received an A.B. from Duke University.

Bill Patry

Bill is Senior Copyright Counsel at Google Inc. He previously served as copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, a Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights, a law professor, and in the private practice of law. He is the most prolific scholar of copyright in history, and has authored an eight-volume treatise and a separate treatise on the fair use doctrine.

Matthew Szulik

Matthew is a 1978 graduate (B.S. Natural Science) of St. Anselm College. After completing a one-year stint in Gulf & Western Industries Corporate training program, Szulik found his true passions – technology and entrepreneurship. From 1984 to 2008, Szulik held leadership positions in three early stage companies that developed into publicly traded entities. In 1998, Szulik joined a fledgling magazine publisher, Red Hat, based in Durham, North Carolina. Szulik transformed Red Hat into a global leader of enterprise software and service based on open source software. Today, Red Hat is synonymous with Linux and open source. Szulik led Red Hat to a highly publicized IPO in 1999 followed up with a historic listing on the NYSE. Because of his leadership, Red Hat became a S&P 500 company with a multi-billion dollar market capitalization. In 2008, he moved in to the Chairman role at Red Hat and retired from the company in 2010.

Szulik is a Trustee of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, a board member of the University of Notre Dame School of Engineering, and a Trustee of The Healing Place, a non-profit organization that assists men and women with drug and alcohol addictions.

John Q. Walker, Ph.D. – Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

John is a co-founder of Zenph Sound Innovations, and was a co-founder of Ganymede Software. In his five years as vice president of product development, Ganymede products consistently won “Best Product” and “Product of the Year” awards. For example, only two companies won Network World magazine’s “World Class Award” twice in 1999: Dell Computers and Ganymede Software.

Walker co-authored a book on VoIP for Cisco Press. “Voice over IP” (VoIP) is the use of data networks to transfer telephone conversations which have been converted from analog to digital. He also authored a book with Zenph co-founder Peter Schwaller on portable network programming for McGraw-Hill. He has authored dozens of technical articles, and is frequently an invited speaker on networking, software engineering, and musicological topics. He leads all patent efforts at Zenph, and was involved in the preparation of a dozen patent filings at Ganymede, all of which were granted patents.

He was influential in the creation of the IEEE 802 local-area network (LAN) and the 802.11 wireless LAN (“Wi-Fi”) standards. Walker has extensive experience in the development and management of emerging technologies in engineering development organizations. At IBM, he managed teams developing high-speed networking software. John holds Bachelor degrees in piano and mathematics, and a Masters of Science degree in computer science from Southern Illinois University. He also pursued Masters-level work in music performance at the University of Illinois, where he was recently inducted into their Alumni Hall of Fame. He received his Ph.D. in software engineering from the University of North Carolina, and was named a Distinguished Graduate Alumnus at the UNC Graduate School’s centennial. He holds five patents, and is a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS).