ANZA Mentors


ANZA Technology Network has a unique portfolio of senior experienced US-based mentors who work with you in your participation in the Gateway, Fast Track and Bridge to the US programs.

ANZA mentors all have the following outstanding characteristics:

  • at least 10 years senior executive experience in the US
  • thorough understanding of the commercialization issues facing early-, mid- and advanced-stage Australian and New Zealand companies as they enter the US market
  • an extensive personal network of senior contacts in specific verticals in the US
  • a passion to assist Australian and New Zealand innovative companies as they enter the US market

Simon Anderson, CMO, Pictage.com
Simon Anderson leads the marketing, sales and product teams at Pictage with responsibility for all branding, messaging, sales execution, partnerships and product strategy. He is excited to be working with creative and entrepreneurial photographers to deliver great products and services to their customers. Simon has been an executive at three prior Internet ventures -- Biggerboat, Authenticlick and Affinity Internet, and before that was a partner at the Australian venture capital firm Allan & Buckeridge. He earned a B.Sc. and a law degree from Australian National University and has atteneded executive programs on entrepreneurship and deal-making at Harvard and Stanford.


Tom Anderson, Founding CEO, Pediatric Bioscience, LLC
Tom Anderson has more than 20 years experience in the bioscience and biotech field. Presently, he is the CEO of a bioscience start-up Pediatric Bioscience in Sacramento, CA. Prior, he was CEO and Vice President of Business Development for Lipomics Technologies in Sacramento, a role in which he grew the company’s revenue over 20-fold. Tom has advised companies in the biotech and bioscience industries, including Epoch Biosciences (NASDAQ: EBIO), a provider of proprietary technology to accelerate genomic analysis, Byotix, a start-up agricultural biotechnology company, and Crestcom International, a management training company, in which he helped sell its program to biotech companies. Tom also served as Chairman of the Board of Berkeley Antibody Company (BAbCO) for 10 years. Tom co-founded BAbCO and oversaw its sale to Covance Research Products in 1998, a move that saw a 500% return on investment for BAbCO's common stock investors. Tom has a PhD in physiology-anatomy from the University of California, Berkeley and was a post-doctoral fellow in molecular biology and endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Jonathan Baer, Principal and Co-Founder, Threshold Ventures
Jonathan Baer is a senior executive who brings a unique perspective to the world of start-ups. He has been both a venture capitalist as well as the Founder and CEO of two venture-backed companies, eBoomerang, an enterprise software company which was sold in 2006 and Artificial Muscle, Inc., a spinout of Stanford Research Institute (SRI). As a principal and founder of Threshold Ventures, Jon works with companies around the world, serving as an advisor/mentor, working on specific projects (such as creating venture-backed companies from emerging new technologies and helping international companies develop and execute plans for entering the US market), and, when appropriate, taking on interim operating roles. He has worked with a wide range of software, telephony, hardware and services businesses. Earlier in his career, Jon was a General Partner at Oscco Ventures, a Sand Hill Road early-stage venture capital firm which was one of the pioneering firms in Silicon Valley. He has invested in a range of companies including Landec, Peerless Systems and Coinstar. Jon started his career at Exxon Enterprises, where he was responsible for creating and managing new businesses for the corporation. He has also worked for the Gartner Group and Prudential Securities, where he managed a portion of a $240M fund.

Sheryle Bolton, Business Strategy Consultant
Sheryle Bolton is a business strategy consultant for companies in the technology, health care, brain fitness and media markets. As a serial entrepreneur, Sheryle led companies from start-up to IPO and sustainable growth. She raised almost $100 million in investment funding, guided development of 20 software and Internet products and devised patent strategies resulting in more than 120 granted patents for these companies. As Chairman and CEO of Scientific Learning, she led a highly successful IPO. Sheryle is also an experienced executive in investment banking, private equity, health care and media and has served on Boards of Directors of several public and private companies and mutual finds with assets of $60 billion. Sheryle has an MA in Linguistics and a Harvard MBA. She was recently part of the US expert panel evaluating companies for the ANZA Fast Track program in Melbourne as well as the 2008 ANZA Success in the US tour of Australia and New Zealand. She has served as an ANZA mentor for several companies.

Tom Cervantez, Partner, Hayden Bergman Rooney PC
Tom Cervantez is a partner with the law firm Hayden Bergman Rooney in San Francisco. Tom specializes in corporate finance and intellectual property law, including securities, capital structure planning, private placements, mergers & acquisitions, venture financing and licensing transactions for emerging growth companies, venture funds and software and hardware computer companies. Tom has spoken on these practice specialties and how they apply to Australian and New Zealand businesses entering the US market at many ANZA events. Tom also runs two San Francisco-based angel groups, the Harvard Angels and the Golden Gate Angels. Tom has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Kerry Haley, Director of Global Infrastructure, Better Place, Inc.

Kerry Haley is the Director of Global Infrastructure at Better Place, Inc. She is responsible for the strategy, implementation, and evolution of the Better Place infrastructure networks worldwide, directing and optimizing the life cycle of the Better Place infrastructure, from scope definition through operation, coordinating with multiple functional areas within the company to deliver cost-effective, manageable, reliable and scalable networks. Prior to joining Better Place, Inc., Kerry was Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Frontier Mobile, the wireless division of Frontier Communications (NYSE: FTR), a full-service communications provider in markets across the US. Kerry has also served as CEO for Affinity Solutions, a financial services company. Previous to these positions, Kerry spent 10 years working with Fortune 500 customers managing multiple domestic and international commercial construction projects. She holds a BS in International Finance from the University of Santa Clara.

David Hutton, PhD, Founder & Principal, Hutton Associates

David Hutton, Founder and Principal of Hutton Associates, provides business development consulting services (corporate partnering, strategic planning) to those in the Life Science/Biotechnology sectors. An avid entrepreneur, he actively participates in the search for novel technology around which to foster the creation of new ventures; he is responsible for founding four biotechnology start-ups. Special relationships have been developed with offshore organizations seeking to foster business relationships in North America. An honors biochemistry graduate of Oxford University, England, David received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of California at Davis.

Olivier Jerphagnon, Serial Entrepreneur

Olivier Jerphagnon has 10 years of experience in the telecom industry in the US and Europe. His areas of expertise are fiberoptics and broadband communication. As part of the start-up team at Calient he brought to market a world-class product under intense competition at the height of the dot.com bubble. When the bubble burst, Olivier successfully re-directed the company's marketing strategy and shifted the company's focus to maintain sales revenue. Olivier is a serial entrepreneur who believes the ability to communicate and sell a new solution is the key to success behind the development of great new technology.


C. Anthony Jones, MD, Founder & President, Next Lifesciences

Anthony Jones brings extensive knowledge and more than 10 years of hands-on experience in healthcare innovation development and marketing. First with Deloitte Consulting, then as Vice President of the Health and Wellness unit at Scient, he has led major marketing strategy projects for some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical, biotech, medical devices and services companies. Anthony received his degree in medicine from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine followed by a fellowship in medical informatics at Columbia University. Anthony is a graduate of the University of Kentucky where he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry.


Michael Loftus, CEO, Broadcaster Media
Michael Loftus is a visionary start-up leader with over 20 years of experience in launching interactive media companies, defining their core strategies, developing product roadmaps and driving their sustainable revenue. He is CEO of Broadcaster Media, a mobile solutions company that enables advertisers to interact directly with consumers through their mobile devices. These services facilitate the rapid creation and deployment of ad-sponsored, media-rich content directly to a marketer's mobile audience. The Broadcaster Media platform connects brands with their consumers through real-time content that can be delivered to their handset, email inbox or shared with their peers. Previously, Michael prepared and launched Connect Directories in Dubai, UAE and Say Hello in Jacksonville, FL. Like his earlier company, inFreeDA, these companies all provide the ad-sponsored information services that have transformed today's "411", offering a zero-cost alternative to fee-based "411" calls. Michael was CEO of InFreeDA, which was sold to AT&T in 2006, Chief Marketing Officer of NetFish Technologies prior to its acquisition by IONA and Executive Vice President for Eagle River Interactive prior to its acquisition by Agency.com. Michael has assisted in growing these companies from various stages, including obtaining investment capital to achieving full product launch. Michael's extensive knowledge and success in managing these technology-based companies has led to several positive liquidity events.


Ron Mackey, Owner/Partner, GarageTek

Ron Mackey is an entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in high-tech engineering, marketing and product strategy and planning. He began his career as a software developer with Bell Labs, and four years later founded Distribution Systems International with four other engineers. At DSI, Ron was on the leading edge of 100Mbps fiber optical LAN technology called Fibre Distributed Data Interface (FDDI). The product was successfully bundled with AT&T's and Motorola's FDDI chipsets, and the company was acquired by Osicom Technologies in 1996, which named Ron CTO. In this role, Ron led LAN, WAN and optical engineering groups, and successfully completed a spin-off of part of the company's embedded print server product division, NetSilicon, resulting in a $500M market valuation at IPO. Subsequent roles included Director of Product Strategy and Planning for Tellabs, where he worked on building its new optical networking group and Chief Marketing Officer for Calient Networks, a leader in photonic switching technologies. In 2006, Ron became the owner/partner of GarageTek, a garage organization, storage and flooring system and has since acquired all the franchises in the Chicago region. In the past two years, Ron's GarageTek franchises have more than tripled in size, despite the difficult housing and home improvement markets.

Jarmal Richard, CEO, jdrlegal

Jarmal Richard is a legal international intellectual property attorney, licensed to practice in both Australia and the US. As the Founder and CEO of jdrlegal, a global intellectual property firm with offices in Melbourne and Los Angeles, he has worked with numerous technology companies to commercialize their intellectual property between Australia and the US. Jarmal holds a BA in English Literature from Dartmouth College and a JD from the University of Southern California Law School. He is also a PhD candidate at RMIT University, with his research focused on open source business modeling for entrepreneurs.


Chris Shipley, Co-Founder and Chairman, Guidewire Group, Inc.
Chris Shipley is a leading technology analyst focused on entrepreneurship and innovation. In 2004 she co-founded the Guidewire Group, Inc. to accelerate the growth of early stage companies and the technology markets they create. Well known as the Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences for IDG's Network World, Chris has helped technology companies bring more than 1,500 new products to market since 1996. Chris is an ANZA mentor and has participated in ANZA Gateway Focus Workshops for the past several years. Her analysis of and feedback for many Australian and New Zealand companies has led to their successful participation in the Gateway to the US program.

Beatrice Tarka, CEO and Founder, Mobissimo

Beatrice Tarka is the CEO and Founder of Mobissimo, a travel search engine. A serial entrepreneur, Beatrice brings a blend of Internet, leisure travel industry and consumer product experience to her role with Mobissimo. Prior to Mobissimo, Beatrice was Co-founder and CEO of Axall Media, a games and edutainment software company. She engineered the acquisition of two companies, negotiated licensing deals with Hearst and MGM/UA and completed distribution deals in 20 countries. Previously she co-founded France Portage, a press distribution database provider acquired by France Telecom. Beatrice holds a BA from the American University in Paris and an MBA from Boston University.

Jennifer Zanich, CEO, Xumii
Jennifer Zanich is an accomplished leader with over 20 years of marketing and executive management experience. She is the CEO of Xumii, a mobile phone solution provider. Previously, as CEO of Wedgetail Communications she delivered more than 7x return for investors. As Founder of SeeSaw Networks, a media services company, Jennifer successfully raised $10m in venture capital. Jennifer has also held executive positions in SkyPilot Networks (wireless broadband) and Microsoft APAC. Jennifer holds advisory and board roles in the US and Australia with Capital Markets CRC, Aggregate Knowledge and Express Mobile.