Dave Millman

Current

• Vice President Marketing at CiraNova, Inc.
• General Partner at Naipo Partners LLC

Past

• President at Tactics Sells High Tech Inc.
• Expert witness in software intellectual property & distribution agreement cases at Expert Witness (Self-employed)
• Director of Marketing at IBM

• Director of Marketing at Epic Design Technology
• Territory Manager at Aida Design Systems
• Applications Engineer/AE Manager at Daisy Systems Corp
• Engineer at Motorola

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Recommended

10 people have recommended Dave

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Semiconductors

Dave Millman’s Summary

I accept all invitations at davemillman@yahoo.com.

Like so many of you, the lesson I took away from the bubble and the bust is that the fundamentals matter. As a general partner in an investment fund, a company with just one profitable customer relationship is far more interesting to me than another with lots of gee-whiz technology and PowerPoint slides, but no customer validation.

As a marketing professional, my focus is on identifying the critical business issues in the market, and building a solution to deliver value well integrated with current business processes.

As a management team member, I'm always on the look out for unsubstantiated assumptions, so that I can call a customer and figure it out.

My passion is getting inside the customer's head to understand more about their problem than they do. Too often we accept a 6-12 month sales cycle for a complex technology, when in realty, it is just indicative of our customer's lack of a quality process for understanding our business benefits and exploiting our value.

Dave Millman’s Specialties:

The last few years have been about slashing sales cycles, fighting commoditization and price competition, validating business & product plans, and positioning a company in its "sweet spot." Most of my work has been in the software, semiconductor and internet businesses. I've also spent a bit too much time doing expert witness work in software & intellectual property (IP) cases.

Dave Millman’s Experience

• Vice President Marketing

  CiraNova, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Semiconductors industry)

  October 2004 — Present (3 years 10 months)

  Responsible for identifying a clear market opportunity where Ciranova's unique technology can have a major impact, and the defining the right product set and business model to exploit that space. If you know analog EDA and want to talk about a fascinating new opportunity, please contact me. (http://www.ciranova.com.)

• General Partner

  Naipo Partners LLC

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Venture Capital & Private Equity industry)

  August 1999 — Present (9 years)

  Naipo Partners invests in Seed and Series A companies with great product concepts and teams. Most but not all of our investments have been in clients of Tactics Sells High Tech, Inc., where we were able to validate their business plan with customers.

• President

  Tactics Sells High Tech Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Market Research industry)

  January 1991 — September 2004 (13 years 9 months)

  Co-founded the company and helped grow the best darn market research firm in high-tech. Market validation shouldn't be hard, but an awful lot of companies cook up business models, messaging, pricing and product concepts based on not much more than wishful thinking. Tactics developed industry-leading methodology, people and technology to find a company's sweet spot and grow sales fast.

• Expert witness in software intellectual property & distribution agreement cases

  Expert Witness (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; Myself Only; Information Technology and Services industry)

  March 1993 — May 2003 (10 years 3 months)

  Provided expert witness analysis, declarations, depositions and testimony in widely watched cases involving misappropriation of intellectual property, violation of licensing agreements and breach of distribution contract. Also provided rebuttal testimony to effectively disprove assertions made by opposition's experts.

• Director of Marketing

  IBM

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; IBM; Semiconductors industry)

  June 1990 — January 1991 (8 months)

  Recruited as part of a turn around team for an acquired product line. Playing on the Blue team was a great experience.

• Director of Marketing

  Epic Design Technology

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Semiconductors industry)

  January 1989 — June 1990 (1 year 6 months)

  Sixth employee and first sales & marketing pro.

• Territory Manager

  Aida Design Systems

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Semiconductors industry)

  February 1986 — December 1988 (2 years 11 months)

  Sales rep for electronic design automation tools for territory spanning area code 408 and "rest of USA". Sold to semiconductor manufacturers including Toshiba and Harris Semiconductor.

• Applications Engineer/AE Manager

  Daisy Systems Corp

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; DAZY; Computer Software industry)

  May 1983 — February 1986 (2 years 10 months)

  Presales applications engineer for Daisy, an early leader in computer aided engineering (CAE) and electronic design automation (EDA). Trained all applications engineers in sales & demo technique. Helped open sales offices in the US, Europe & Israel.

• Engineer

  Motorola

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; MOT; Computer Hardware industry)

  January 1981 — May 1983 (2 years 5 months)

  Designed, prototyped & debugged character generator and video memory boards for smart terminals. Designed a Motorola gate array to replace one board, using just paper and pencil (there weren't any design capture or simulation tools!).

Additional Information

Dave Millman’s Groups:

EDAC (EDA Consortium) Co-founded this industry trade organization and served as its vice-chairman for two years. (http://www.edac.org)

•    Earlystage.com Entrepreneurs member
• Forbes.com San Francisco Group member
•    Startup Specialists member
•    VENTURE CAPITAL ASIA member

Dave Millman’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch