Dick is a co-founder of STA Travel, one of the world's leading travel companies. Founded in 1979, STA Travel has continued to advise young people on holidays and adventures abroad, offering a unique range of flights, accommodation, tours and expeditions in 90 countries. Dick is also the Chairman of Griffin Global Holdco Ltd, the private equity backed leading travel specialist for the marine and offshore industries; Director of Digital Visitor, creators of the social media platform Visitor Review; Chairman and investor in Top Deck Tours Ltd, a youth tour operator operating in Europe, Australia and New Zealand; an advisor and investor in three European on-line ventures; and Chairman of the British Educational Travel Association (BETA), the professional association representing the youth, student and educational travel sector.

Mark is a principal at Scottish Equity Partners (SEP) and focuses on information technology investments. Before joining SEP he was European Director of Sensory Networks, a venture-backed global network content security company. As well as commercial experience, Mark has research experience in the semiconductor and telecommunications sectors. He researched high speed semiconductors with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has also done consultancy work for Fortune 500 companies including work on Boeing’s space program.
 

Olaf Jacobi is an entrepreneur and partner at Target Partners, a Munich-based venture capital firm with 225 million Euro under management. Prior to joining Target, Olaf founded Collax Inc. (Boston and Munich) in 2005, a Linux server solutions vendor, and served as CEO of the company until the end of 2006. He was an investor and Chief Sales Officer of Cobion AG, an IT security solutions provider which was successfully sold to ISS Internet Security Systems Inc. (Atlanta) in 2004. From 1999 to 2002 Olaf was a management board member at ACG AG, a company publicly quoted on the Frankfurt stock exchange. Since 1994 Olaf served in various management positions in the IT sector, including as Senior VP for Marketing and a management board member of Minolta GmbH.

Dean Jacobs received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1985. He then served on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern  California, where he studied distributed systems, databases, and programming languages. When the Internet began to get widespread commercial use, Dr Jacobs joined the company WebLogic, which was later purchased by BEA Systems. There, he developed the clustering and caching infrastructure for WebLogic Application Server, for which he holds twenty-five patents. Dr Jacobs then joined Salesforce.com, where he helped to develop a highly-scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure for Software as a Service. Currently, Dr Jacobs is a Chief Development Architect at SAP, where he continues to work on SaaS and bringing enterprise applications to the Web.

Mac Smith is an IT professional who has held a number of senior positions with international travel industry companies. These include head of IT for Avis Europe and Hilton International. As a consultant he has led major IT projects for many internationally renowned hotel companies. He also has substantial experience with vendor contract and service agreement negotiation in the UK and USA.