People
Ambient’s Board of Directors
Larry Begley
Co-Founder & Managing Director, .406 Ventures
Prior to co-founding .406 Ventures, Larry had 28 years of senior management experience in start-up and scale technology and services companies.
Leading up to the formation of .406, Larry spent eight years as an active director of 17 companies, including five public and 12 venture-backed companies.
Larry's operating experience included serving as EVP, CFO and Director of CCBN.com, where he played a key role in the sale of CCBN to Thomson Financial for $150 million. Prior to CCBN, he was EVP, CFO, Treasurer and board member of i-Cube and Razorfish, where he oversaw revenue growth from $9 million to $41 million in three years, the i-Cube IPO (underwritten by Morgan Stanley and named Massachusetts IPO of Year 1998) and the company’s ultimate sale to Razorfish for $1.8 billion.
Larry served as a Partner, CFO and Treasurer of The Boston Consulting Group during a period which the firm grew from $100 million in revenue to $550 million and from a presence in six countries to 28 countries throughout Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas.
Early in his career, Larry held financial roles at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, The Foxboro Company, Data Resources Inc, and Softbridge Microsystems.
Larry currently serves on the boards of .406 portfolio companies Ambient Devices, Optaros, and RatePoint and is a board observer on the Mashery board. Larry also represented .406 on the board of ChosenSecurity prior to the sale of the company to PGP Corporation in February 2010.
Larry has a BSBA in Accounting from Boston College (magna cum laude) and an MBA with a concentration in Finance from Babson College (honors with distinction).
Greg Dracon
Principal, .406 Ventures
Greg Dracon joined .406 in 2007 and is involved in all aspects of the investing and portfolio management process. He has 18 years of venture investing and technology operating and management experience.
Prior to joining .406, Greg was a Vice President of Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage venture and small to mid-sized growth technology companies. At Core, Greg focused on software, digital media, technology-enabled services and wireless applications.
From 1995 to 2005, Greg held various operating and management roles at Texas Instruments, including positions in worldwide sales, business development, product distribution and digital signal processing applications.
Greg received his MBA, with majors in Entrepreneurial Management and Finance, from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his BS in Electrical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University.
Pritesh Gandhi
Co-Founder & CEO, Ambient Devices
Tom Grant
General Manager, ThingMagic
Prior to joining ThingMagic full-time as CEO in 2004, he was an early stage venture investor and business advisor to Boston's high technology companies. He is Founder and Managing Partner of Protos, and General Partner for Applied Technology, both early stage venture investment funds. He was previously with Softbridge MicroSystems, a PC software development company, and Data Resources, Inc., where he was group Vice President. Tom has served on the Board of Directors of several early stage companies. He is a Trustee of Northeast Health Systems, a $300M community health system north of Boston, and founder and Director of Heads Up!, a non-profit devoted to linking community service activity and student-athletes.
Howard Morgan
Managing Partner, First Round Capital
Howard Morgan has more than 25 years of experience serving as a mentor, advisor and investor in entrepreneurial ventures.
Howard was Professor of Decision Sciences at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of Computer Science at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 through 1985. He has been a Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology and the Harvard Business School. During his academic career he served as an editor of Communications of the ACM, Management Science, Transactions on Office Information Systems and Transactions on Database Systems. His research on user interface technology, and on optimization of computer networks led to his bringing the ARPAnet to Philadelphia in 1974. As a result of this early participation in the internet, he advised many corporate and government agencies on the uses of electronic and voice mail, implementing it throughout the Wharton School in the mid 1970s.
From 1983 to 1989, he served as President of Renaissance Technologies Corp. in New York, where he supervised venture capital investments in high technology companies. He was a founding board member and technical advisor of Franklin Electronic Publishers, one of the first manufacturers of personal computers. He has been an active consultant and speaker to users and vendors in the information systems area for more than 30 years, and has worked with many of the Fortune 100 companies and numerous government agencies.
Since 1989, he has been President of the Arca Group, Inc., nurturing early stage companies and taking them from seed stage through initial public offerings. He also serves as a Director of Idealab, where he was a founding investor in 1996. Dr. Morgan serves on a number of public company Boards, including Franklin Electronic Publishers and Internet Brands, Inc. He is also Chairman or a member of the board of numerous private companies including Energy Innovations, Evolution Robotics Retail, snap.com, MagicWorks LLC and Math For America. He has also served as CEO of Kentek and Franklin during various turnover or transitional periods. In 1997, he was named Delaware Valley Entrepreneur of the Year. Howard is a respected author and a frequent speaker at major industry conferences.
He received a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University in 1968, and a B.S. in physics from City College of the City University of New York in 1965.