Team
Get unprecedented access to company building experience. The VDC team has been part of creating companies worth a billion dollars as both investors and entrepreneurs.

Board
Dan Phillips
Chairman and Cofounder, CloudHealth Technologies

Dan Phillips has been an executive in five technology growth companies over a 30+ year period. Two of these companies have gone public, two were acquired by EMC/Dell, and his latest startup, CloudHealth Technologies, is one of the fastest growing technology startups in Boston today and has been recently acquired by VMware. Dan also founded the UMass Boston Entrepreneurship Center in 2009.

Michael Gaiss
Founder, ThinkB1G

Michael Gaiss is the Founder at ThinkB1G which connects an elite group of startups and top universities with exciting career opportunities at these companies. Formerly with Highland Capital Partners, he spearheaded a number of key strategic market, portfolio, talent and entrepreneurial development initiatives at Highland. Michael was also responsible for the Highland Entrepreneur Center, a dedicated environment that has hosted 95 seed and early stage initiatives since 2001.

David Lucchino
Co-Founder, President and CEO, Frequency Therapeutics

David Lucchino co-founded and served as CEO of Semprus BioSciences until its acquisition by Teleflex in 2012 for $80M. Prior to co-founding Semprus, David was a senior executive at Polaris Venture Partners. He is a Trustee of Babson College and a board member of Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. David earned an M.B.A. from MIT’s Sloan School of Management as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

David McFarlane
President and COO, Help Scout

David McFarlane has a history of successful IPOs, M&A exits and long term quarterly execution in the software industry. Most recently he was CEO & Co-Founder of Akiban Technologies. Before that, he was COO responsible for worldwide sales, marketing and services of Imlogic which was acquired by Symantec for $90MM. He was also President & COO of Xchange Inc., which IPO’d. He is an investor at CommonAngels, and was the President and COO of Litmus.

Jim Counihan
General Partner, Prism VentureWorks

Jim Counihan is a General Partner at Prism VentureWorks. Jim joined Prism in 2000 and runs the firm’s software and services practice. Possessing a unique mix of legal, operational and technical knowledge, he is a director for White Sky, The Receivables Exchange, Mota & LifeCrowd, and is a board observer at Connotate. He has a JD from Suffolk University Law School.

John Hamilton
Entrepreneur in Residence

John Hamilton is an accomplished executive with over 25+ years experience managing early stage startups to acquisitions and IPOs. John has vast sales and marketing expertise that has spanned several well known Boston based companies from Stratus Computer, EMC, FTP Software, Concord Communications, Phase Forward, XKoto, Softricity (sold to MSFT for $265M) and Viewfinity. His ability to scale companies has yielded significant returns for shareholders across the board.

William Brah
Founding Director

William raised $7.8 million to design, build and launch the Venture Development Center in 2009. It is the region’s first deep tech incubator offering startup labs for scientists and engineers. He was also instrumental in pioneering the Massachusetts Global Entrepreneur-in-Residence program. William has 25+ years executive experience in policy, science and business.

Staff

Venture Development Center
University of Massachusetts Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125-3393

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vdc@umb.edu
1.617.287.6070

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