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Kapow Software:
Leadership

Executive Team


John Yapaola - Chief Executive OfficerJohn Yapaola - Chief Executive Officer

John has a long, successful track record of managing and growing high-tech start-up companies. Prior to joining Kapow Software, John was CEO of Let’s Think Wireless, a wireless infrastructure design, engineering and installation company. Before that position, he was Executive Vice President of Business Development for Paytrust (acquired by Intuit), where his responsibilities included implementing all venture and fund raising activities.

Before Paytrust, John served as Executive Vice President of Operations for the Americas for The Fantastic Corporation, where he built the American operation and was responsible for all sales, marketing strategies and operations. He also served as Vice President of Sales at LogicWorks, then the leader in the relational database modeling and design market, where he helped lead the company to its IPO.

John is a founding member of the New York Angels Investment Group and serves on the board of several privately held companies. He holds a B.S. in business administration from St. Peter’s College.

Stefan Andreasen - Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Stefan Andreasen - Founder and Chief Technology OfficerStefan Andreasen is a true entrepreneur, innovator and net-worker with more than 25 year experience in software. He spent five years in Boston with Advanced Visual Systems working on cutting-edge Java and visual programming projects. In 1998 he started Kapow as the largest European marketplace for cars, real estate and boats for sale. The items for sales was collected from dealer's websites and published on www.kapow.net. The Web ETL software is based on a scalable automation browser with full AJAX support, using flow-chart based visual navigation and programming, to allow for hyper-agile integration and automation between applications on the web (inside and outside firewall). In 2001 Stefan Andreasen sold the marketplace to the largest bank in Denmark and changed Kapow into a software company - Kapow Software. The software was developed into a full powered Enterprise-class Cloud and Application integration platform now serving more than 500 companies world-wide. In 1995 Stefan Andreasen relocated himself and the company headquarter to Palo Alto in California where he is now the Founder & CTO of Kapow Software.

Stefan is a frequent blogger on www.kapowsoftware.com/blog and speaks at many industry events about innovation and integration software trends.

Mark Finkel - Chief Financial Officer

Mark Finkel - Chief Financial OfficerMark has spent the majority of his career in finance and operations in the high-tech industry. He has guided many fast-growth companies through successful exits including LogicWorks, a Morgan Stanley-led IPO, and Consillium, led by Hambrecht & Quist.

Mark also served as CFO for Backweb, ServiceWare and Neuron Data. Over the past ten years he has worked with over twenty companies as an acting executive or consultant. He founded RightAnswers in 2001 by successfully leading an investment group acquisition of ServiceWare Technologies’ content division, where he served as CFO. Prior to that position, he served as a Venture Partner for Prism Opportunity Fund and represented Prism on two company boards.

Earlier in his career, Mark practiced corporate law at Ware & Friedenrich, where he specialized in technology companies and equity financing. Mark holds a J.D. from the University of California, Davis, an MBA from New York University and a B.A. from Oberlin College.

Rory Byrne - Vice President, Business Development

Rory Byrne - VP of Business DevelopmentRory is a seasoned business development executive, having served several well-known Silicon Valley technology firms. Prior to joining Kapow Software, he was responsible for acquisition integration as part of Yahoo!’s Corporate Development group. Before joining Yahoo!, Rory led the business development team at Hyperion for three years and developed a number of Hyperion’s strategic partnerships, including the alliances with SAP, Microsoft and Oracle (which ultimately acquired Hyperion).

At Brio Software, Rory developed the company’s partner program and led the recruitment of OEM and reseller partners before its acquisition by Hyperion in 2002. Prior to Brio, he served as head of channel marketing for Altitude Software, where he managed the go-to-market activities in North America. In Rory’s early business years in the Bay Area he held a number of positions at Visa USA, including Director of Interchange Pricing Strategy.

Rory is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin and qualified as a Barrister-at-Law in Ireland. He holds an MBA from Santa Clara University.


Rick Kawamura - Vice President, Marketing

Rick is a seasoned marketing professional with extensive U.S. and international experience in product marketing, product management, and strategic planning at industry-leading B2B enterprise, Internet, mobile, and SaaS companies.

Prior to joining Kapow Software, Rick served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at DeNA Global, the U.S. subsidiary of DeNA Co., Ltd., Japan’s most successful mobile Internet company. He was responsible for the successful US launch of the world’s largest, fastest growing, mobile portal site. He has also served in engineering, product management and strategic marketing positions at Motorola, Palm, and Sun Microsystems.

Adept at delivering competitive advantage, superior customer value, and profitable growth, Rick is responsible for driving global marketing for Kapow Software to accelerate growth and drive leadership in the application integration market.

Rick is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and holds an MBA from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.


Anne-Sofie Nielsen - Vice President of Research & Development

Anne-Sofie is an accomplished software engineer and on-going leader of Kapow Software’s R&D efforts. She is recognized as one of the top 12 most prominent Danish women in science and is active as a public role model and mentor to young women in technology. To strengthen Kapow Software’s competitive position, Anne-Sofie has doubled the size of the R&D team by recruiting world-class software engineers, testers, and usability experts in collaboration with leading universities. As vice president, she ensures the superior quality and accelerated delivery of Kapow Software’s technical innovations in social media, cloud, mobile and big data solutions.

Prior to her tenure as director of Kapow Software R&D, Anne-Sofie served five years as a software engineer on the Kapow Software team. In this capacity, she was responsible for the development of a number of key components, most notably the Kapow Integration Browser, the first and only web browser purpose-built for secure, scalable, and automated application integration and business process execution. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (Technical University of Denmark) in Lyngby, Denmark.

 

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