Headquartered In Austin, TX
Meet the Team
Central Texas Angel Network
Staff
Katie Russel
Executive Director
Katie Russel joined CTAN in January 2023 as the Executive Director. She graduated with her M.B.A. in 2022 while simultaneously building her startup and investment portfolio. Katie comes from the tech world, previously working at Facebook as an Ad Analyst and at RetailMeNot in Product Operations. She previously led Business Development and Marketing at Draper University and was an investor with Draper U Ventures, focusing on pre-seed founders. Katie also spends her time as the Managing Partner of Draper Startup House Accelerator, a pre-seed “pop-up” accelerator program in Austin, TX. She is passionate about empowering entrepreneurs to take the big jump into creating their own companies and opening up the world of entrepreneurship to everyone. Katie is excited to lead the next phase of growth at CTAN. You can reach her at Katie@CTAN.com.
Katelyn Bentley
Program Coordinator
Katelyn Bentley joined CTAN in August 2023 as the Program Coordinator. Previously, Katelyn worked as a C-Level Executive Assistant at a home remodeling company in San Antonio, TX, as well as at a podcast network in Nashville, TN. She holds a BA in Mass Communication with a focus on Public Relations from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. She is a communications professional with a natural eye for detail. Throughout her career, she has been cultivating skills like project management, content creation, social media, marketing, and brand strategy, as well as nurturing client/partner relationships. Katelyn is passionate about and advocates for continual personal development and strongly believes in lifelong learning. She is intrigued by innovative ideas and is eager to contribute to the growth of CTAN. A Texas native, Katelyn enjoys raising her daughter near Austin, where she spends her time investing in her family, perfecting her baking skills, and exploring the outdoors.
Board of Directors
Gary Forni
Chairman
Gary Forni’s focus is on starting, mentoring, investing in, and growing startups in Central Texas. As an investor, his focus is innovation and disruptive technology. As a member of the business community, he works with accelerators to maximize the success of entrepreneurs at Capital Factory, TechStars, Austin Technology Incubator, and as a founding investor and mentor in SKU. As an entrepreneur, he has worked to bring eight new businesses to market.
In the distant past, he was an executive at Marvell Semiconductor and Intel Corp. At Intel, he was part of starting four new businesses, including the flash memory business, which exited for $1.2B, and the XScale cellular business, which exited for $600M. At the industry level, Mr. Forni has published over twenty articles and papers, chaired standardization committees, and co-authored a book on flash memory technology. Gary picked up a BS ECE more than a few years ago and still has the computer punch cards to prove it, as well as an MBA, just in case that programming stuff was a fad.
Jeff Bonyun
Jeff joined the CTAN Board in October 2020. To him, the best thing about CTAN is hearing the pitches, the new ideas, and the excitement of the entrepreneurs. Jeff finds it invigorating to make his own determination as to which startups are likely to succeed, but he won’t proceed without a critical mass of CTAN investors with him. Jeff believes the wisdom of CTAN as a group exceeds that of any individual.
Jeff has been with CTAN since 2010 and has entered roughly 30 deals in that time. He has deals in every SIG, but his successes have come from pharma and B2B software, and his biggest failures are in consumer products and services. Jeff is opposed to anything with the words “mobile,” “social,” or “blockchain” in them, yet he’s a sucker for the keyword “AI.” He likes to put his full investment into a company in the first round, when the valuation is low, rather than drip out money over time.
Jeff’s day job is automated market making — think software that trades stocks for you. So, he works hands-on with software development and financial markets on a daily basis. Jeff has his own small company to do this sort of thing, using his own capital. Jeff is originally Canadian but now considers Austin home for his wife, his two young kids, and himself.
Lance Adams
Lance began his career as a process development engineer at IBM after earning degrees from MIT and the University of Texas. After a few years, he and a friend got bored with that and bought a small, struggling manufacturing and construction company. He eventually decided he liked engineering better, but Lance stayed on, managed to turn it around, grow it, and sell it to a small public company. With the dot.com boom underway, Lance went to business school focused on science and technology commercialization, hoping to catch the wave. But when he graduated, it was the dot.com bust… A classmate then started the Central Texas Angel Network, and Lance became one of the original members. He later served on its board for seven years, where it grew to one of the largest in the country, and over time, he has invested in over 30 startups there and mentored some companies as well. He has always also had an interest in real estate and used to do fix and flips on the side before they started making TV shows about them, and he personally did some hard money lending as well. While Lance currently holds a real estate broker’s license, most of his investments are now passive. His hobbies include hiking, backpacking, and amateur driving (and instructing) at a couple of Texas racetracks.
Jake Hampton
Jake is an entrepreneur and angel investor who has spent most of his career at the intersection of insurance and technology. The early part of his career was spent on the large corporate side of the business, working initially for both a global insurance carrier as well as several of the largest insurance brokers in the industry. After leaving the corporate world, he moved to the land of startups, founding his first company during the dot com era, where he learned many life lessons. He gained his international experience when he was recruited to lead the US operations for an industry initiative to automate the insurance placement process at Lloyd’s of London. His most recent venture was a company he founded that developed a SaaS platform for performing insurance transactions between US and UK clients. He successfully sold the company to one of the largest private equity-backed insurance software firms in the US.
Jake now focuses on angel investing and mentoring entrepreneurs within those firms. He lives in Austin and holds a BA in Economics and a BBA in International Business from UT Austin, as well as an MBA from St. Edwards Austin.
Steve Pollinger
Steve Pollinger is an intellectual property lawyer who has focused on patent litigation for over 30 years. He is a Principal at McKool Smith, for which he opened the Austin office in 2020. In addition to his law degree, Steve holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he grew up. Steve’s practice is nationwide, at trial and on appeal, for plaintiffs and defendants. Steve’s jury verdicts for his clients have included five nine-figure verdicts. Steve enjoys evaluating businesses, particularly technology companies. Additionally, in his spare time, Steve enjoys tennis, sailing, and kiteboarding.
Tom Miesner
Tom Miesner spent 25+ years at Conoco Pipeline, retiring as President in 2003. After retiring (the first time), Tom founded a lifestyle consulting business, serving clients in the oil and gas midstream industry. Tom accidentally learned about the value of equity investing when, in 2009, he consulted with a PE firm and agreed to take his payment in equity. After the PE firm acquired the company, Tom joined the board and was asked to be the chairman. After many trials and tribulations over eight years, the company successfully exited to another PE firm in 2017 – that company continues today with the same CEO Tom brought into the company and mentored.
Over the years, Tom wrote three books about the oil and gas pipeline industry. In 2020, when he finished Oil and Gas Pipelines in NonTechical Language – 2nd Edition, Tom’s publisher asked him to write a book about the electrical power industry, and The Electrical Power Industry – a NonTechnical Guide is scheduled for release on December 6. Tom, being a glutton for punishment, is now writing Energy Choices – a NonTechnical Guide. He enjoys learning, solving problems, thinking about energy, investing in early-stage companies, and helping entrepreneurs develop and execute business strategies and tactics. When not thinking about energy or early-stage companies, Tom can be found cycling with his wife, spending time with his family, or riding around on his Kubota tractor.
Dave Gino
A technology industry veteran with over 30 years of experience in senior executive roles. Dave came to Austin in 1996 as part of the IPO spin-out of Dupont Photomask (DPI) from Dupont. His experience ranges from large public companies to small startups with a very broad background in raising critical growth capital, including two initial public offerings, a number of venture-backed equity and debt financings, product and IP licensing, and creatively structured commercial partner funding arrangements. Most recently, Dave led the sale of Molecular Imprints’ semiconductor business, a UT Austin spin-out, to Canon in 2014 and the subsequent sale of Molecular Imprints’ non-semiconductor business to Magic Leap in 2015. Dave is now an active angel investor and board advisor who enjoys working with entrepreneurs who are looking for some advice or simply want to run an idea, financing, or complex business arrangements by him.
serving area
The Great State Of Texas
Share On: