Board Officers and Members

Charles Armstrong

Charles Armstrong is the co-founder of U.K. based Trampoline Systems social analytic software. The company's SONAR technology analyses business communications to map internal collaborations, analyze external relationships and report on critical performance factors. Trampoline's been featured by journals including Wired Magazine, the Financial Times, Der Spiegel, the Wall Street Journal and Boing Boing. Awards include selection for Gartner's Cool Vendor report, CRM Magazine's Rising Star award, Red Herring's Global 100 and IDC's Top 10 Innovators award.

Charles is a graduate of St John's College Cambridge. Trampoline Systems grew out of Charles' ethnographic research into social behavior underlying efficient collaboration, which saw him spend three years living in small island communities. He is also on the board of directors of Fundacja TechSoup in Warsaw.

Joaquin Alvarado

Joaquin Alvarado is the Chief Strategy Officer for the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). Before joining CIR, Joaquin served as senior vice president for digital innovation at American Public Media and founding senior vice president for diversity and innovation at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He is the founder of CoCo Studios, which promotes media collaboration and game development for fiber and mobile networks. Joaquin was the founding director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet, which launched in 2005 from San Francisco State University. In 2004, Joaquin began the National Public Lightpath, advocating high-speed, fiber-optic network as the next generation of the Internet.  Alvarado holds a bachelor’s degree in Chicano Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA from the UCLA School of Theatre, Film, and Television.  In addition to serving on the board of TechSoup Global, he is also on the board of DEI - the public broadcasting development association. He is the co-author of "Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art."

Daniel Ben-Horin – Board Secretary

Daniel Ben-Horin is Founder and Chief Instigator of TechSoup Global. His profile can be found on Wikipedia here

Michael Brown

Michael Brown is the Director for Corporate Development at Twitter, Inc. and prior to that he served as the head of corporate development at Facebook. Michael is well known for his interest in evolving the Social Web, and became one of the first supporters of TechSoup's NetSquared initiative to bring Web 2.0 tools to nonprofits worldwide, contributing significantly to the success of the NetSquared conference in May 2006. Michael is a graduate of Stanford Business School where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Robert Frank

Robert Frank is currently Managing Director for Japan at the Gap, Inc., after serving as Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for the Gap’s Banana Republic division. Robert has also worked for McKinsey & Company in San Francisco where he was a leader of the firm's West coast retail and consumer group. Robert has an MBA from The Anderson School of Business at UCLA and a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.

Jeffrey Hamaoui

Jeffrey Hamaoui is the Founder and Managing Director of the Cazneau Group (formerly Origo, Inc.)  Jeff is an expert in sustainability and public-private partnerships with 15 years experience exploring business models and unique approaches to social entrepreneurship. 

Jeff co-founded Origo, Inc. in 1999, and has since positioned himself to work as a cross-sector broker, facilitator, and strategist by working with the U.S. government to formulate public-private partnerships between agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department, NASA and PEPFAR, and the venture community, pension funds and a wide diaspora of companies and foundations.  He spent several years working alongside the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and its 150 Fortune 500 companies looking at strategies for 'inclusive' business in emerging markets. This allowed him to consult across industry sectors, including healthcare (Pfizer), telecommunications (Vodafone, Nokia), oil and gas (BP and Chevron), utilities (Eskom, Suez, GE), and finance (Rabobank, Deutschebank, Wells Fargo, GE Financial). 

In addition to serving on the board of TechSoup Global, he is also a member of Play Rugby USA’s board of directors.  He received his M.A. in Education from London University and B.A. in Philosophy and Literature from Swansea University.  He is fluent in Spanish and French.

Leila Chirayath Janah

Leila Chirayath Janah first developed the idea behind Samasource while working as a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Co.), where her clients included global leaders in the outsourcing and telecom sectors and a number of prominent non-profits. Along with Professors Thomas Pogge and Aidan Hollis, she founded Incentives for Global Health; and helped produce a plan for incentivizing the development of new drugs for neglected diseases. As an undergraduate, Leila authored background papers for the World Bank's Development Research Group and Ashoka; on equity and social rights. Leila is a recipient of the Rainer Arnhold and TEDIndia ellowships, and serves on the San Francisco board of the Social Enterprise Institute. She is a former Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Program on Global Justice; and the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Australian National University. When she's not running Samasource, Leila blogs on Social Edge; and tries to keep up with her Twitter; account. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University.

Reto Jauch

The founder and lead partner of the independent Executive Search boutique Jauch Associate AG in Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to establishing Jauch Associates, Reto lead Executive Search businesses for Robertson Associates and A.T. Kearny Executive Search, coming to head A.T. Kearny Executive Search Europe, a business operating in 10 locations. Clients of Jauch Associates AG include large multinational companies as well as highly competitive international niche players and start up companies.

Todd Khozein

Todd Khozein is a managing partner of SecondMuse, a firm that applies the art and science of collaboration to enable businesses and organizations to create positive impact.

Todd spends the majority of his time at SecondMuse working with government, multilateral and multinational clients to design and implement partnership based initiatives that are focused on addressing some of the world's greatest challenges. Among the initiatives he has helped to conceive, launch and scale are LAUNCH (a collaboration with the U.S. Department of State, NASA, USAID, Nike), Random Hacks of Kindness (in collaboration with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, HP, NASA, The World Bank) and Code4Country (Russian and American programmers united to address challenges of openness and transparency).

He also spends time with his colleagues developing and testing the emerging science of collaboration where they are actively studying mechanisms and processes by which organizations and individuals can transcend the constraints of traditional competitive models. Central to his approach is the belief that all systems develop within particular ideological frameworks that, over time, no longer accurately represent our current understanding of the structure of reality. In order for systems to be maximally effective, their systems must be informed by our ever-evolving understanding of what we know to be true.

Todd Khozein holds a Doctor of Medicine and Bachelor of Arts with Phi Beta Kappa and Golden Honor distinction from the University of New Mexico. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Harmony Equity Group.

Anthony Lee – Board Chair

Anthony Lee is a General Partner of Altos Ventures, a first-stage technology venture capital fund. He serves on the boards of several high-growth, global technology companies, including Accelovation, CrownPeak, Demandbase, GuardianEdge, and Xignite. Prior to Altos, Anthony served as Vice President of Marketing for social Web search pioneer Clip2.com. Previously, he was Vice President of Marketing for Evolve Software, which achieved a successful IPO in late 2000. Anthony also co-founded Signature Wines, an Inc. 500 distributor of private label wines. Anthony began his career as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and has published a national magazine. Anthony serves as a Director of the National Association of Investment Companies (NAIC) and as a Trustee of FSC Business Today. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, and a founding member of the Full Circle Fund. Anthony earned his MBA from Stanford University and BA in Politics and Economics from Princeton University.

Rebecca Masisak

Rebecca Masisak is CEO of TechSoup Global. Her profile can be found on Wikipedia here

Julie Pietrantoni

Julie Pietrantoni is an associate in the Technology Transactions Practice Group at Cooley, LLP. She joined the Firm in 2001 and is resident in the Palo Alto office.

Ms. Pietrantoni's practice focuses on technology related transactions, including software licensing, product procurement, hardware and software distribution agreements, development and technology transfer agreements and strategic alliances. Ms. Pietrantoni has also assisted in a number of the Firm's information technology outsourcing transactions. Ms. Pietrantoni represents a variety of clients ranging from start-ups to large public companies.

Ms. Pietrantoni earned a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law in 2001, where she served as a senior editor of the California Law Review . During law school, Ms. Pietrantoni clerked for the Office of the General Counsel of the United States Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, California. She completed her undergraduate education at California State University, Hayward, where she received a B.S. in Business Administration with an emphasis in international finance, cum laude , in 1992.

Before her studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Pietrantoni founded and owned her own financial services practice specializing in investment, retirement and tax planning counseling. Ms. Pietrantoni is a Certified Financial Planner, she holds the Enrolled Agent designation from the Internal Revenue Service, and she is a Registered Investment Advisor.

Ms. Pietrantoni is admitted to practice in the State of California, and is a member of the State Bar of California, the San Francisco Bar Association and the Santa Clara Bar Association

Michael Saunders

Michael Saunders is the President of Information Organizers, LLC. Prior to this, he was the Executive Officer at HandsNet for 6 years. During that period he oversaw the effort to make the shift from HandsNet Classic, a proprietary online service, to a totally Web-enabled platform, WebClipper, to support more than 3,000 online members. Mr. Saunders has sixteen years of private industry experience, most recently prior to HandsNet as a Principal Consultant in the Organizational Change practice with Price Waterhouse. He has also worked with Reuters Information Service, and in marketing and systems engineering with IBM. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and an AB in Engineering and Applied Science from Harvard University.

Buzz Schmidt

Buzz Schmidt, Senior Strategic Advisor to TechSoup Global management, is founder and chair of London-based GuideStar International (GSI). GSI, a UK charity registered in 2006, illuminates the work of the world’s nonprofit organizations through online repositories of reports about nonprofits in each country. It now operates within the TechSoup Global network. In 1994, Buzz Schmidt founded GuideStar USA, which he led for 10 years. In 2003, he founded GuideStar UK. He was named 1999 U.S. Nonprofit Executive of the Year by The Nonprofit Times and one of six visionary leaders in philanthropy by Time Magazine in 2001. He serves on the boards of The FB Heron Foundation (Chair), TechSoup Global, The Institute for Philanthropy (London), and Preservation Virginia. He is a graduate of Princeton and Stanford’s Graduate Schools of Business and Education.

Sandra Whisler

Sandra Whisler is the Chief Financial Officer at ChangeLab Solutions and, prior to this, she was the Director of Finance and Operations at Public Health Law and Policy (PHLP). She comes to PHLP from PolicyLink, where she oversaw financial management, human relations, information technology, and facilities. Prior to PolicyLink, Whisler was first the launch director for www.techsoup.org; and then vice president and managing director responsible for finance, human resources, IT, and facilities at CompuMentor. Previously, she had a long career in academic publishing, including serving as Director of Electronic Publishing and associate director, Journals Division at the University of California Press and assistant director and director of Journals Marketing at the University of Chicago Press. She holds a degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago.