Meet the Team
- Michael Schutzler, Chief Executive Officer
- Robert Sanregret, Vice President Enterprise Sales
- Damon Lanphear, Vice President Engineering
- Karl da Gama Campos, Managing Director, International
- Garrett Link, Vice President Product & Community
Board of Directors
Michael Schutzler is a respected business leader with more than 25 years of proven operational success in the telecommunications, enterprise software, printing, and internet sectors. He has served as an angel investor for more than a dozen companies, many with successful exits, and is the author of an acclaimed book on leadership - Inspiring Excellence. Prior to Livemocha, Schutzler led the consulting firm CEOSherpa, where he served for three years as a CEO advisor and executive coach for startups and mid-sized companies in the financial, pharmaceutical, and technology industries.
Prior to CEOSherpa, he served as the senior executive at RealNetworks responsible for global marketing, advertising sales, and managing the worldwide games division. During his tenure, Schutzler expanded the casual games business internationally, growing revenues to over $100 million and establishing the company as a dominant player in the online gaming world. As senior vice president at Monster.com, he accelerated product development and transformed online marketing for the company’s billion-dollar business. Prior to that, Schutzler served as CEO of Classmates.com, the service recognized as one of the first social networking sites. He led the company from a small, struggling start-up to a nationally recognized brand and category leader with nearly $100 million in annual revenues. Earlier in his career, he served in sales management, product management, and engineering roles in several industries throughout the US, Asia, and the Middle East.
Bob brings over 20 years' experience in the enterprise learning software, eLearning, and language learning industries including OutStart, Global Knowledge, Sylvan, Learning Tree and Rosetta Stone. Prior to Livemocha, Bob co-founded Hot Lava Software - a mobile learning app & content company serving over 2 million people. Bob worked with over 200 companies and government organizations to define and design mobile content and learning technology solutions. At Rosetta Stone, he served as a contract exec to hire, train, and manage a new enterprise sales function and grew revenue from about 100K/month to a nearly $1M/month in less than 2 years. Hot Lava was acquired by OutStart – a leading enterprise content management system provider.
Bob is a highly respected entrepreneur and sales executive with a strong specialization in learning technologies and mobile software. He has actively served as a speaker and panelist at the world’s leading learning, mobile and software conferences including ASTD, SALT, mLearning, Mobile Edutainment Malaysia, and eLearning DevCon.
Damon Lanphear is a 15 year veteran of Seattle's internet technology community with deep experience in delivering world-class applications and infrastructure to the mobile telecommunications, entertainment and education sectors. Damon joined Livemocha from his most recent post as Chief Architect for Medio Systems where he led a team in delivering one of the first cloud-based behavioral targeting engines in the world while building the company's intellectual property portfolio. Prior to Medio Damon served as the Director of Systems Research at RealNetworks. In this role Damon led internal and external teams to drive innovation in the rapidly evolving field of mobile multimedia experiences.
Damon has patents in mobile multimedia delivery, and patents pending in the field of large-scale analytics infrastructure. He holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Hamilton College.
Karl brings to Livemocha 20 years' experience in international sales and business development, primarily in the technology space, having worked the spectrum of hardware, software and services. He is adept at managing and growing complex, transnational relationships with strategic and channel partners on all continents.
Prior to joining Livemocha, Karl was in a state government role responsible for helping small- and medium-sized technology companies from Washington State to expand their business internationally, as well as for attracting foreign direct investment into the state’s vibrant technology industries. His private sector experience, building multi-million dollar revenue streams, was with Jallatte S.A. (in France), and with Seattle-area companies Midisoft, Allied Telesis, Appian Graphics, and Glyph Language Services.
Karl has lived, worked and studied on four different continents. He is a graduate of the University of London and holds a pan-European MBA from ESCP Europe (Paris-Oxford-Berlin). His French is native-speaker level, and he is fluent in German, conversational in Spanish, and is now working on recovering his childhood language, Portuguese.
Garrett Link is a seasoned veteran of the games industry. Prior to Livemocha, Garrett was the General Manager for RealNetworks social gaming product line generating 24 million members in less than 18 months. In his ten years at Real, he served in a number of roles including business development, marketing, and product management in the Gamehouse Division. Garrett also managed the studio that launched dozens of award winning casual games including SuperCollapse, TextTwist, Scrabble, Uno, and many others.
Prior to RealNetworks, Garrett worked on Everquest at Sony Online Entertainment and the award winning Total Annihilation franchise at Atari/Humungous Entertainment.
Board of Directors
Amy Errett is a partner at Maveron where her focus has been on emerging Web enabled consumer trends, e-commerce social shopping, and online education. Amy currently serves on the Altius Education, Livemocha and KidZui boards of directors.
Most recently, she was chief executive officer and an owner of Olivia and grew the company to over $25 million in 2007. In 2006, she was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California. Prior to her work at Olivia in 2002, she founded and served as chair and chief executive officer of The Spectrem Group and later part of the senior management team at E*Trade where she ran a $200 million business that encompassed the management of E*Trade's growth areas.
Amy is the chair of the board of Glide Foundation, San Francisco's largest nongovernmental, direct social services organization. Amy is also a member of San Francisco's Barbary Coast chapter of YPO and serves on the board of Wharton West. A New York native, Amy earned an MBA in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in liberal arts from the University of Connecticut. She is a fanatical UCONN Huskies fan where she was a student athlete.
Howard Hartenbaum joined August Capital in 2008. Prior to joining, he served as a General Partner at Draper Richards LP where he was the founding investor in Skype and a former member of the board of directors where his achievement resulted in his joining the Forbes Midas List of top venture capitalists.
Before entering the venture capital field, Howard was at Hughes Electronics, where he was responsible for supporting business development, marketing and sales of satellite, information security and automotive technologies developed by HRL Laboratories. He also worked in engineering positions in ergonomics and user experience at Honda Motor Company and manufacturing at Teledyne Relays.
Howard has worked overseas for a total of ten years in Luxembourg and Japan. He is a graduate of M.I.T.
His investments include: Pixazza, Swoopo, Skype (acquired by eBay – EBAY), Photobucket (acquired by Fox Interactive Media – NWS), Bebo (acquired by AOL – TWX) and Netkraft (acquired by Adea Solutions)
Shirish Nadkarni is the founder of Livemocha. He serves on the board as the representative of the commons stock shareholders. Prior to Livemocha, Shirish was the founder and CEO of TeamOn Systems where led a team that built a unique consumer wireless e-mail platform that is in use today by over 2 million BlackBerry users. TeamOn Systems was acquired by RIM in 2002 for its innovative work which formed the basis for RIM's highly successful launch into the consumer space as the BlackBerry Internet E-mail service.
Prior to RIM and TeamOn Systems, Shirish was a senior executive at Microsoft MSN where he successfully drove the product and business strategy that catapulted MSN.com from ninth place to among the Web's top three portal sites. While at MSN, he personally orchestrated the acquisition of Hotmail and partnership with Inktomi Corporation to jump start Microsoft's entry into the two largest internet application categories - E-mail and Search respectively. Shirish holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSE from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.