ONSET Ventures Names Two VCs to General Partner
MENLO PARK, CA September 30, 2002 ONSET Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm specializing in early stage investments, has promoted Leslie Bottorff and Mark Hilderbrand to general partner. Both have also been named managing directors of ONSET IV, the company’s most recent venture fund.
"Leslie and Mark excel at identifying market opportunities and partnering with entrepreneurs. They enable management teams to achieve their ambitious goals,” said Terry Opdendyk, founder and general partner of ONSET Ventures. “Their skills exemplify our investing team's ability to help build great companies."
Ms. Bottorff began working with ONSET Ventures in 1998 as an executive in residence, and was named a partner in 1999. She has been involved since the inception of such companies as Embolic Protection, Inc. (acquired by Boston Scientific in 2001), where she was interim vice president of marketing and business development; Curon Medical (CURN: NASDAQ); Novasys Medical; and Walnut Technologies, which she co-founded. She is currently on the board of directors of Spinal Concepts, Walnut Technologies, VisionCare Opthalmic Technologies, and Novasys Medical, where she serves as chairman.
Ms. Bottorff brought 19 years of experience in the medical industry to ONSET Ventures. Previously, she was vice president of sales and marketing at a division of Medtronic, Inc. She has also served in various marketing and sales management positions at both venture backed start-up companies and large companies including Nellcor, Inc., Ventritex, Inc., Menlo Care, Inc. and General Electric's Medical Systems division.
She has a BS in Interdisciplinary Engineering with biomedical focus from Purdue University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Mr. Hilderbrand joined ONSET Ventures as a partner in 1999, focusing on enterprise software and technology infrastructure. With more than seven years of venture capital investing experience, he has invested in numerous successful information technology companies. He led the incubation and was the founding investor in Nextance, a provider of enterprise software solutions for contract management. He was the initial venture investor in Enosys Software, an infrastructure company providing XML and XQuery-based solutions for enterprise information integration.
Mr. Hilderbrand has served on the board of directors of GHz Technology (acquired by Advanced Power Technology), Clontech Laboratories (acquired by Becton, Dickinson and Company), Coleman Consulting Group (acquired by Blue Pumpkin Software), Decision Technologies (now DTI), Enosys Software, GERS Retail Systems, and Nextance.
Prior to joining ONSET Ventures, he was a vice president at Summit Partners where his investing activity focused on software, communications and technology services. He was a management consultant at Bain & Company where he focused on the software, semiconductor, telecommunications and data networking industries. Mr. Hilderbrand also worked as a communications engineer at AT&T, where he was instrumental in the deployment of long haul fiber optic transmissions systems in the western United States.
In 1997, Mr. Hilderbrand founded the Non-Profit Performance Initiative, a collaborative effort between the Harvard Business School, the Stanford Graduate School of Business and McKinsey & Co., to develop performance metrics for non-profit organizations.
Mr. Hilderbrand holds a BS with honors in Electrical Engineering from Boston University, an MS in Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Based in Menlo Park, California, ONSET Ventures (www.onset.com) provides venture capital to early stage companies in the information and medical technology markets, and has more than $500 million under management. Since 1984, ONSET Ventures has provided both the start-up investment capital and the dedicated mentoring that innovative young companies need to grow and succeed.