Partners

John Zdanowski

John Zdanowski is serial entrepreneur with experience growing companies from early stage startups to over $100 million in revenue.  John has led or arranged 16 acquisitions, one IPO, dozens of venture capital, private equity and debt transactions for companies he either founded or joined as CFO.  In addition to Foresight Ventures, John is the co-founder and CFO of PixelFish, the leader in online video marketing for local businesses; and serves on the boards of RentJuice and Movoto in the online real estate industry.

John was the CFO of Second Life as it grew from $10m to $80m and generated tens of millions of dollars of free cash flow from the sale of virtual land and virtual currency. Prior to Second Life, John was the CFO of HouseValues as it grew from $20m to $100m in revenue. John led the $94m IPO of HouseValues in 2004. Prior to HouseValues, Zdanowski co-founded Affinity Internet, Inc. raising more than $60 million from investors include JP Morgan and Columbia Capital to build a highly profitable Web hosting company serving more than 200,000 small- and medium-sized businesses. Affinity was sold to Hostway in 2007.

Zdanowski holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University.

Val Jerdes

Val has over 15 years experience in finance and entrepreneurship in the US and Russia. He worked at Apple Computer on the Newton product, the Advanced Tech Group at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, and subsequently co-founded three successful start-ups in Silicon Valley. He has worked and advised in Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry, and sits on the board of numerous companies, including ThinkWave. In Russia he has worked in Private Equity as well as for the government innovation program. Val received a B.A. at Pomona (California), M.A. at Stanford University and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Andrey Kazakov

Andrey founded and made the initial investments into Cloudmach, a 3D graphics software. Previously, he was a Sales executive for Image Analysis systems and software outsourcing to the US market. Andrey started his career as a software engineer developing operating systems and enterprise software at EMC. In 2008 Andrey received a MS in Economics from St.Petersburg State Polytechnical University.

Vladislav Sviblov

PhD in Economics. Between 2002-2006 Vladislav rose from Operational Manager to Senior Vice President at Rosbulding, a leading Russian holding company. In 2007 he founded GK GOLD, a metallurgy company specializing in nickel and gold. He is an active investor in real estate and venture capital. In 2006 Vladislav received a PhD in Economics from Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics

Raphael Bennett

Raphael the Founder and CEO of NeuStep, most known for its flagship product WebWalk™. Raphael has spent over 10 years pursuing creative and innovative solutions to some of the most common issues plaguing businesses today in the growing world of web-based marketing and commerce.
Raphael holds a Bachelor’s degree in Entrepreneurship from Northern Michigan University.

Andrew Cheeseman

Andrew spent most of his professional life in IBM Sales (2002-2008), followed by a position as Director of Emerging technology at Mattel. Andrew is expert in solution and platform sales, social networks and virtual worlds, technology and innovation speaker and evangelist in emerging and internet technologies.

Sergej Shijanov

MBA Duke University & Frankfurt University. After graduating from Riga Polytechnical University in 1984, Sergey worked as engineer of e-connection systems at Commutator. He subsequently served as the Head of Parex Bank Moscow representative and continued as a Head of marketing department (Riga). Sergey joined Foresight Ventures in 2010 as Investment Director. Sergej received an MBA from Duke & Frankfurt Universities in 2008.

Andrey Savichev

After graduating ITBU (Moscow Innovation Technologies University), Innovation management program in 2007, Andrey worked as Associate Marketing Director in Moscow’s Scientific Centre of Innovation Solutions. In 2010 Andrey held an Expert Systems business planning courses. Andrey joined Foresight in 2010 as Associate and project manager.

Eugene Levin

Graduated from Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnical University, MS. He worked as an Analyst and Project Manager within information security on development tools and security assessment. He was also preparing IBM, HP and Alcatel-Lucent products for assessment procedure. He took part in patent development within information security measures. Since 2011 Eugeniy has started working as an Analyst in Foresight Ventures.