Member Profile

David’s 30+ year career has featured Founder or CEO of four start-ups and Director of two others. He has been involved in dozens of early stage technology companies either as an executive or investor and his sector expertise is in software with particular emphasis on electronic design automation.

Most recently, David was Chairman of Forte Design Systems, a leader in electronic systems-level design software. Forte was created from the successful merger of Cynapps and Chronology Corp., where David was the CEO for six years.

Prior to Chronology, David was a founder of Tangent Design Systems where he was VP Marketing and European Sales. Tangent developed software for place-and-route of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS). The acquisition of Tangent by Cadence Design Systems in 1989 led to David having a series of senior management positions at Cadence that included Worldwide Support, Operations, and General Manager of a business unit.

After receiving a BS in Mathematics from Caltech, David was a mechanical engineer at Technar Inc., a start-up in automotive and aircraft safety devices. His design for the airbag crash detector achieved a dominant market share after Technar was acquired by TRW. David earned his MBA in Finance and Management Science from UCLA. From there he launched the EDA software business at Hewlett Packard.

Currently, David is an active angel investor in engineering and bioinformatics software companies. For the last 15 years, David has had leadership responsibilities in several non-profit boards, primarily in education.