John is a former general partner of Startup Capital Ventures and is now a Special Fund Advisor. John has over 35 years of experience as a successful entrepreneur in the communications networking industry. Early in his career, John served as the University of Hawaii's liaison to the Technical Working Group for the ARPANET program, out of which the Internet was born. His role in the ARPANET program included participating in the design and implementation of the TCP/IP protocols. John founded and led two successful communications networking companies. The first company was Ungermann-Bass, Inc., the networking industry's first Local Area Networking company, which he co-founded in 1979. He served as the company's Chief Technology Officer and helped grow the company to $400 million in revenues and 1,600 employees. John led the company's development efforts through its IPO in 1983, and its $260 million sale to Tandem Computers in 1988. John left Ungermann-Bass (Tandem Computers) in 1993 to found his second company, Network Telesystems, Inc., a self-funded internet infrastructure software company, where he served as Chairman and CEO. The company supplied Internet Protocol software to ISPs, carriers and enterprise customers. NTS was acquired by Efficient Networks in 2000, which itself was acquired by Siemens in 2001. John is currently working on building another company, Spoxel.

Tim was Founder of Hawaii Superferry, a company that brings energy-efficient inter-island ferry service to Hawaii. Prior to that, Tim was Founder and President of Grassroots.com, a political web technology company. In 1995, he founded WorldPages.com, the Internet's first white & yellow pages, which went public and was subsequently acquired by Transwestern Publishers (now BT). Previously, Tim was a principal at the Boston Consulting Group where he led CEO-level strategy consulting work on a global basis with significant work in transportation, oil & gas, nuclear generation & electric utility industries along with key groups like the Electric Power Research Institute. Tim was a senior engineer at Beckman Instruments where he developed the first electronic speech synthesizer for use in hospital intensive care units, and the world's first instrument-on-a-chip.

A believer in social responsibility, Tim co-founded TRUSTe.org, which has become the Internet's privacy standard. He serves or has served as board member and advisor to numerous companies, including Emptor / Accept (acquired by Amazon), Affinity Engines, Biopacific, and Spoxel.