Shawn McLaren
Chairman

Shawn is a Silicon Valley legend who was the sole inventor of the first storage management product in the mainframe world. He was the sole founder of the Cambridge Systems Group which sold a security product, ACF2, which along with ASM2, his storage management product, went head-to-head (and won) against IBM in the 1970s and 1980s. Shawn went into early retirement in Pebble Beach after selling Cambridge in 1986. He returned to the Valley to run Securant which developed and sold an internet single signon product. Securant was sold to RSA in 2001.

Shawn is currently Chairman of ConnectAndSell, Inc. and is actively involved in its business development and sales. He is also an active angel investor who is a member of the Band of Angels, and a mentor, board member/advisor to other Silicon Valley startups.

Shawn is a Midwesterner who may spontaneously erupt into singing a passionate rendition of the University of Michigan fight song upon meeting a fellow Wolverine.

Ilya Druzhnikov
Founder

Ilya brings to ConnectAndSell a track record as an entrepreneur and a sales professional in high technology. Prior to founding ConnectAndSell, Ilya was a co-founder of Tamarind, Inc., which develops social networking tools for corporate environments. In 1998 he co-founded Panop.com where he headed sales prior to the company's acquisition by Broadbase in 2000. He attended Stanford University where his work focused on neural networks and human-computer interaction.

Andrei Stoica
Founder

Prior to founding ConnectAndSell, Andrei co-founded Panopticon, a company which addressed the challenge of online, real-time, intelligent merchandising. In 2000 the company was acquired, as Panop.com, by Broadbase Corporation for over $100M. Andrei's career has also included contributions in engineering. As part of the Zeevo design team, he built an embedded controller for a state-of-the-art Bluetooth system. Prior to his industry experience, Andrei was a Lecturer at Stanford University in the Electrical Engineering Department, teaching the advanced lab course in hardware design. Andrei graduated in 1994 from Stanford University with a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering, having received the Terman Award – the highest academic honor offered by the School of Engineering. In 1997 he received a Master's in Electrical Engineering, also from Stanford.

Bob Cohen
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Bob Cohen is the creator of the SPACEMAN series of retail space management programs. Bob is credited with being among the first to introduce PC technology into the retail sector, both for suppliers and retailers. SPACEMAN and its offshoots are currently used in most of the retail community around the globe.

Bob is known for his ability to take complex business problems and develop easy-to-use, comprehensive, automated solutions. Bob's unique approach to problem solving looks at issues from the management, marketing and sales perspectives, as well as from the technology aspect.

Bob earned his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California and his Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University.

Girts Graudins
VP, Engineering

Girts brings over 10 years of experience in business consulting, project management, software architecture, database design, and open source internet telephony.

Prior to joining ConnectAndSell, Inc., Girts was a senior consultant with the Exeter Group in Cambridge, MA, where he devised and delivered custom technology solutions for a range of clients in business strategy, higher education, government, and health care.

Girts earned his Bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics (with honors) from Harvard University and a Master's degree in Information Technology from Harvard.

Steve King
Chief Marketing Officer

Steve has over 30 years of computer industry experience in sales and marketing, software engineering, product development and professional services.

Steve has extensive market experience in ERP, Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, eCommerce, Business Process Reengineering, Security, and Operating Systems.

Steve also has extensive product management experience with UNIX, Microsoft and Java platforms. Steve founded three software and services startups and raised over $20m in venture capital. Steve has been a CIO twice, and has held a variety of executive management positions for marchFIRST, Virtual Integration Technology, Worksmart! Technologies, Endymion Systems and IBM. Steve attended the University of California at Berkeley majoring in Applied Mathematics.