Web2Ireland event Speaker – Jeff Clavier
10th of April 2006 by admin
Based in Palo Alto (CA), Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech Venture Consulting, a firm providing services to the ??osoftware ecosystem???, primarily early stage consumer Internet startups. Jeff will typically get involved as an advisor, board member or part-time executive, focusing on business development, fund raising, and strategy matters. He is also an active angel investor.
His current areas of interests both in terms of projects and personal investments include search, social media (blogging, syndication, aggregation), communities and open source. These are also the primary topics covered on his blog, Software Only, alongside venture capital, startup and industry news, Software Only is also part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup.
Jeff has spent over sixteen years in the software market, as an entrepreneur, a senior executive and a venture capitalist. Throughout his career, he got exposed to the global market: leading development teams in Europe and on Wall Street, designing products that were sold internationally and investing in software infrastructure startups across the USA and Europe.
Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff was the President of RVC Capital, the firm managing the Reuters Greenhouse Fund the Corporate Venture arm of Reuters that has invested $560M in 82 companies since 1994, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com, Infoseek, As the Partner in charge of US Operations, Jeff's focus was on investing and managing the US portfolio, as well as supporting all companies in their commercial and business development efforts. Jeff's Board involvements included UltraDNS (CA), Tacit (CA) and Pathfire (GA). He was also involved in a number of other portfolio companies: Moreover (UK), Bitpipe (MA), PacketVideo (CA), SpiritSoft (UK), Epicentric (CA), Kinecta (CA), GiantBear (NY) and Epoch Partners (CA).
Jeff joined the Venture arm of Reuters from its product development division, where he was leading the development of the Risk Management and Desktop unit. He had direct responsibly for 250+ staff in Paris, London and New-York, developing a number of leading front and middle office products: the ATW suite of Unix applications, the Kondor+ Risk Management offering, and the flagship Reuters Desktop Kobra/3000 Xtra, that he designed back in 1993. Jeff became instrumental in the development of the Reuters Open Systems product line since the early 1990's, after its acquisition of Effix Systems, the Paris-based startup company he helped develop in 1989.
A seasoned speaker at events of the VC and Web 2.0 community in the US, Jeff has also been for 3 years the co-producer of the RVC SoftEdge conference, a yearly gathering of the different ??ocomponents??? of software innovation: entrepreneurs, thought leaders, leading technology columnists, CIOs, senior executives of established technology players and venture capitalists. One of the key features of the conference was also to bring innovation from the US, Europe and Israel, hence the choice to organize it in New-York. Most recently, Jeff co-chaired the SDForum Vertical Search Conference, Vertical LEAP and became the founding co-chair of the SDForum Search Special Interest Group.
See Jeff’s blog here