Chris Stone

Bio

Chris Stone brings over 29 years of public and private technology company operational and entrepreneurial experience from engineering to executive management. Prior to joining EPIC Ventures as a Managing Director, Chris was CEO of SiCortex, makers of the world’s most energy-efficient high performance Linux computers. Prior to SiCortex, he was CEO of StreamServe (acquired by Open Text), a European-based document management company ($70m revenue). Chris began his career as a systems engineer for Exxon Office Systems. He was recruited to Data General (DGC) in 1980 (now EMC) in software development, and product management. He led the team that built the first multi-user office system on minicomputers (called Comprehensive Electronic Office). Then in 1989, he founded the Object Management Group (creators of the industry software standard CORBA). The Group became known as the organization that brought object-oriented programming and distributed computing over the internet to the mainstream. In 1996, he was recruited as Executive Vice President at Novell (NOVL). Chris was part of the team responsible for the turnaround and resurgence of Novell. The team concentrated on Open Source, Linux, Directory Services (LDAP), and Internet technologies. Chris was responsible for Novell's strategic direction, M&A (acquiring over 12 companies during this period) and technology leadership focusing on Directory Services and Identity Management/Security. In 1998, Chris formed Novell Ventures, a $50M (growing to $120m) fund that had early stage investments and exits in Red Hat, Akamai, Oblix, NetObjects, Bowstreet, enCommerce, Indus River, and others. His teams return was over 140% IRR. Chris founded Tilion, the first hosted software service for supply chain management and eventually merged with two other companies. In 2001, returning to Novell as Vice Chairman, Office of the CEO, he developed the strategy to acquire SuSE Linux and Desktop Linux maker Ximian, which resulted in Novell becoming one of the world’s largest supporters and providers of Open Source Software. Through his career, he garnered numerous Linux and technology related awards, including being named a top ten entrepreneur by Red Herring, and one of The Top 50 People in High Tech by Ziff Davis. Chris has a B.S in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire and an AMP/M.B.A from Harvard Business School.