Kapow Software:
Leadership
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Executive Team
John 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 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 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.
Karl Ederle - Chief Product Officer
Karl has more than 20 years of executive experience steering product management and strategy at software market leaders such as Oracle, Taleo, SAP and PeopleSoft.
Prior to joining Kapow Software, Karl led the development and implementation of the long-term portfolio strategy across Taleo's big data, analytics, and talent management solutions, managing a SaaS business in excess of $300 million. Prior to Taleo, he served in SAP's Corporate Strategy Group, within the Office of the CEO, where he oversaw the analysis of numerous strategic initiatives ensuring the advancement of SAP's business priorities. He also served as director of product management at PeopleSoft, overseeing the development and management of a $40 million portfolio of financial and performance management solutions.
With a proven track record in delivering analytic application to Enterprise Customers as well as SaaS solutions, Karl is responsible for Kapow Software's strategy and product portfolio, with a particular focus on introducing an expanded set of big data and other cloud-based offerings to satisfy current enterprise customer needs and address new market opportunities.
Karl is a graduate of Western Washington University, and holds an MBA from the University of Washington. Karl also holds the designation of Chartered Financial Analyst.
Rory Byrne - Vice President, Business Development
Rory 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.
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.