Board
Charles Cotton - Chairman. Charles is an experienced director of public companies listed on Nasdaq, Euronext Amsterdam and the LSE and private companies in the USA and Europe. His business passions include building successful global technology companies and spreading the word about the Cambridge Phenomenon.
He is Chairman of Cambridge Phenomenon Ltd and Neul Ltd in Cambridge and a Director of technology companies Solarflare and Veebeam in California, and XMOS and Cambridge Enterprise in the UK.
Prior to its acquisition by TomTom, in 2008, he was a Supervisory Board member of Euronext Amsterdam listed, Tele Atlas. Previously, he was Executive Chairman of GlobespanVirata and CEO of Santa Clara based Virata which he took public on NASDAQ, in 1999.
He was CEO of Shandwick Europe; President of Boston Mass. based Thermal Scientific Inc, and a Director of LSE listed Thermal Scientific. He got the technology bug working for Clive Sinclair as Sales and Marketing Director at Sinclair Research. Before that, he held senior Operations, Finance, Marketing and Product Planning positions at British Leyland and Ford.
He has a BA Hons in Physics from Oxford University and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Arts.
James Collier - Chief Executive. James has been a leader of R&D and business development activities since 1987. He was co-founder of CSR, serving as CTO, head of R&D and plc board member from 1999 to 2010. In that position he had line responsibility for 800 staff in UK, France, Sweden, India and US. He was also the director in charge of operations in India, Sweden and France. He is experienced in IP creation, management and litigation and had led a number of acquisitions. and was responsible for global standards development activities . Prior to 1999, he held a number of executive and technical positions at Cambridge Consultants Ltd. and before that at Schlumberger. James has a degree in Physics from Oxford University, and is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the IET.
Glenn Collinson - Board Member, Chairman of the Strategy Committee. Glenn Collinson is a co‐founder of CSR and helped to manage its growth from a start‐up in 1998 to its listing as a public company in 2004. He retired from the Board of CSR in 2007. Glenn was a non‐executive director of Sonaptic Ltd from April 2005 until its sale to Wolfson in July 2007. Glenn currently holds positions as a non‐executive director of DiBcom SA, Inside Contactless SA and Wolfson Microelectronics plc. Prior to co-founding CSR, Glenn held senior positions at Cambridge Consultants Ltd. (1996‐1998) and Marketing Manager at Texas Instruments (1989‐1996). He is a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and holds a B.Sc. in Physics and an M.Sc. in Electronics from Durham University, as well as an MBA from Cranfield University.
Simon Cook - Simon is the CEO of DFJ Esprit and has been involved with the European Venture Capital industry since 1995. In 2006 he led the spinout of Cazenove Private Equity and acquisition of Prelude Ventures, in 2007 he completed the next stage of Esprit's expansion plan, negotiating the partnership with DFJ to form DFJ Esprit and in 2009 helped lead the acquisition of 3i plc's European VC business.
He has been involved with a number of Europe's most successful technology start-ups. His past board roles include successful companies such as Lovefilm (Amazon), Cambridge Silicon Radio (IPO LSE), Virata (IPO Nasdaq), nCipher (IPO LSE) and KVS (Symantec).
Previously Simon was a partner with Elderstreet Investments and a Director at 3i in Cambridge, and worked as a strategy and IT consultant at KPMG (where he established the Internet practice) and as a computer games developer during the 1980's.
Simon is a graduate of University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).
Max Bautin - Investor Director. Max has worked in venture capital since 2001, first building the seed part of what was to become IQ Capital Partners and then leading the fundraising of IQ Capital Fund and the spinout from NW Brown Group. He has participated in investments in over 30 high-technology companies - including Phonetic Arts (Google), Imsense, Onrelay, Reevoo, DanioLabs (Summit), Novacta, Quotient (EKF), Veebeam and Transversal. In addition to Neul, he currently represents IQCF on the boards of Grapeshot, Sirigen and Power Challenge.
Previously, Max was in Millicom and Metrosvyaz, both private equity players investing in mobile telecoms companies in Eastern Europe and other developing countries. He holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Maryland and an MBA from the University of Cambridge.
David Cleevely - Director. David Cleevely (FREng, FIET) was appointed the Founding Director and Executive Committee Member of the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge in 2009.
He is the Chairman of CRFS, which he co-founded in July 2007, and the founder and former Chairman of telecoms consultancy Analysys (acquired by Datatec International in 2004). In 1998, he co-founded the web based antibody company Abcam (ABC.L) with Jonathan Milner and was Chairman until November 2009.
In late 2004 he co-founded the 3G femto base station company, 3WayNetworks, which was sold to Airvana in April 2007. He has invested in over 35 companies and is Chairman of four of them, including the award winning restaurant “Bocca di Lupo”. He has been a prime mover behind Cambridge Network, co-founder of Cambridge Wireless, co-founder and Chairman of Cambridge Angels and is a member of the IET Communications Policy Panel. For 8 years until March 2009 he was a member of the Ofcom Spectrum Advisory Board. From 2001 to 2008 he was a member of the Ministry of Defence Board overseeing information systems and services (DES-ISS, formerly the Defence Communications Services Agency).
After being sponsored to study Cybernetics at Reading by Post Office Telecommunications, he joined their Long Range Studies Division. A PhD at Cambridge was then followed by the Economist Intelligence Unit in London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the IET.