Rob stands by the principle that the most important element for success in any venture is finding smart, self-driven talent and trusting them to succeed. This has led to bringing together some of the best talent from various industries to implement the vision of a better venture model.

Prior to Originate, Rob co-founded Lumitrend, Inc., a mobile software company. Lumitrend developed a mobile content management platform that wirelessly synchronized contacts, photos, music, and videos between mobile devices and an online data-store. Lumitrend was acquired by Asurion Insurance Services in 2006. Rob subsequently served as Director of Products at Asurion after the acquisition to ensure a smooth transition of the technology and team.

Previous ventures included Meadows Consulting, a technology consulting firm that provided software development for companies such as Qualcomm, Amadeus, and Amazon, and THRIVE Los Angeles, a high-end fashion line. Rob began his career as a software engineer at IBM and a software architect at Slam Dunk Networks, and still enjoys writing code.

Jeff has served on the board of Originate since inception and now runs the day-to-day operations of the strategy group after merging his financial consulting firm, Scheinrock Advisory Group, with Originate Labs in early 2010. Jeff is a CPA with extensive experience in international financial markets, corporate finance, capital structure, acquisitions, and strategic investment; additionally, he teaches entrepreneurship at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Jeff was previously the Chief Investment Officer of GKM Newport Generation Funds from 2003 to 2007, a fund of funds managing $1 billion for investments into venture capital and private equity buyout funds. Jeff also served as Vice Chairman/CFO of Kistler Aerospace Corporation and formulated the capital raising plan for a successful raise of $350 million in equity in 1997.

From 1989 to 1996, he served as Vice Chairman of Finance and Strategic Planning for Packard Bell NEC Electronics, Inc. While at Packard Bell, Jeff negotiated equity investments, set up operations throughout Europe and Asia, and was responsible for all administrative functions including personnel, real estate, accounting, finance, MIS, planning, and budgeting. Jeff negotiated in excess of $1 billion in bank debt and $3 billion in trade credit from companies such as Intel, Microsoft, and Panasonic.

Doug Mandell is the founder and managing partner of the Mandell Law Group, PC, a boutique law firm specializing in employment law, technology transactions and providing general counsel services to technology companies. Last year, Doug served as the General Counsel of LinkedIn Corporation, a company he has represented since its inception. Doug is a recognized expert in the consumer internet space and has also served as the general counsel of ememories, one of the first online photo-sharing websites and the general counsel of Tornado Development, a venture backed unified-messaging software company. Doug was also an attorney with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP in the Intellectual Property and Employment Law Groups and Littler Mendelson, P.C.

Doug has been recognized as a Northern California Super Lawyer for the past three years, an honor reserved for the top 5% of attorneys in the Bay Area. Doug is on the Board of the Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) for San Francisco and serves as the chair of the Governance Committee for EO Global.

Originate is home to some of the top entrepreneurial engineers in the world.

With 7 offices comes 7 top-notch Engineering Directors who manage the Originate engineering teams and provide technology leadership. With past experiences like Google, Cisco, Merrill, TechStars, and MIT, the Engineering Directors have seen it all and bring some of the best practices to the table along with the Originate way.

The server-side team has deep experience with modern web technologies like Ruby on Rails, high-performance languages like Scala, a variety of database solutions, big data analytics and high-availability systems. The mobile team builds sophisticated apps in iOS, Android, and Windows for phones and tablets. And the front-end web team lives and breathes JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Node.js, jQuery, and HTML5.

Craig brings a combination of strategy, finance, and operational expertise to an enterprise. At Originate, he is responsible for leading the investment team, and his portfolio responsibilities include companies in location based services, digital media, and consumer software. He is also CEO of Lottay, a venture backed crowd funding start-up.
Prior to Originate, Craig worked at a strategic advisory firm where projects included M&A, financing, and strategy projects with entertainment, social media, and advertising companies. He also worked at an international development organization in Washington, DC where he was part of the team that ran the 2004 and 2005 elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. Craig holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and bachelor’s degrees in economics and finance from the University of Arizona.

Matthew has spent thirteen years in interactive, mobile, and digital media. After graduating from Stanford University where he was an NCAA Champion and a member of the US Men’s National Swim Team, he co-founded a company that used digital television signals to augment early stage location based services like e-911. He has since developed both content and strategy for numerous media companies from Disney and Warner Bros. to smaller studios with a focus on short form, mobile, and interactive programming. Since graduating with an MBA from UCLA Anderson, Matthew worked at the Boston Consulting Group and with the Digital Distribution team at Warner Bros. He is now the Vice President of Product Innovation at Originate, where his portfolio responsibilities include entertainment, social media, and gaming projects.

Matt brings over thirteen years of business development, pricing, operations, revenue management, marketing and sales experience to Originate. Matt has worked at high growth start-ups such as JetBlue as well as at established Fortune 500 Companies such as Apple. He has taken idea/conception/incubation stage firms and transformed them into profitable and recognizable consumer facing products, corporations and global brands leveraging his knowledge of software integration/development, project/product management, pricing, digital marketing, analytics and consumer research.

Matt began his career as part of the start-up team at JetBlue Airways. During his tenure at JetBlue, he focused on a variety of operational areas ranging from planning, pricing, market research, and revenue management to managing jetblue.com, running multi million dollar digital advertising budgets across search, email and display and driving product strategy behind the consumer-focused web applications. Prior to Originate, Matt worked in business development at Yodlee with a focus on strategy, partnerships, marketing, mobile, product development and SaaS sales. Matt holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a BA in Economics from Boston College. Matt currently resides in Santa Monica and splits his time between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Richard Morganstern is the former President of Tech Coast Los Angeles Network, one of the leading sources of funding for early-stage startups in Southern California, and he currently serves on their Executive Committee. His experience and expertise is broad, ranging from law, to business and finance. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the Bars of California and New York, and various Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal. Richard was the Managing Partner of a Beverly Hills based intellectual property and business litigation and counseling law firm; following his time there, he became the Chairman of a NASD-licensed investment banking firm, which focused on arranging funding for early-stage tech companies. Richard is a key mentor and Senior Advisor at Originate.

Lloyd Taylor specializes in helping companies scale successfully. His professional work has included scaling LinkedIn's infrastructure to support it's rapid growth; developing, implementing and operating an infinitely scalable global physical infrastructure for Google's server farms; building out a worldwide performance measurement infrastructure for Keynote Systems; and developing one of the first managed hosting architectures while at Digex.

Lloyd's pro bono work includes funding and advising a select group of non-profits working on zero-dependency methods for ending poverty throughout the world.

Founder of NeuAer, Dave Mathews is a consumer-focused inventor specializing in mobile, convergence and digital entertainment. He has worked at the startup stages of projects like boxee, Slingbox and is an inventor of the CueCat consumer bar code reader. In addition to holding over 60 U.S. patents, Dave has appeared as a technology expert or host on some 300 television shows, written for PC Mag, and is a founding contributor of O'Reilly's MAKE Magazine.

After the dot-com bubble burst, he was tapped by the Chairman of RadioShack to help re-kindle the spirit of innovation within the retail giant. Through his efforts, several products made it to market and many technologies were created with the help of his Asian and US based teams.

Dave is a frequent public speaker, technology expert for broadcast media outlets and sits on the advisory board of several early stage companies.

Brendon Grunewald is founder and CEO of IceVista, a company that provides operational improvement strategy development and implementation, financial restructuring and merger and acquisition services toward investors, shareholders, their portfolio companies and organizations of all sizes.

He has served as CEO and board member of Sinfilo, where he took the company from incorporation to one of the best known WLAN operators in Europe with a successful exit in October 2003. Prior to that he held various executive positions at several companies including Siemens in Germany. Mr. Grunewald is founder of 70South, a recognize leader in Antarctic news and educational information, is active in Antarctic and polar conservation and education and continues to travel extensively. Mr Grunewald has and continues to serve on company boards or act as an executive or board advisor. Mr Grunewald speaks English, Dutch and German.