Venture Partners
Venture Partners extend Outlook Ventures reach and management capacity with deep experience in strategic and functional areas critical to successful growth of a new venture. Former executives, the Venture Partners bring extensive experience in both building early stage technology companies and working with global corporations. These individuals are available to assist in assessing potential investment opportunities and to provide vital acceleration support to portfolio companies as required.

Cindy Padnos Venture Partner

Cindy joined Outlook Ventures as Venture Partner in early 2004. In this role she has been actively involved in identifying new investment opportunities for the firm and participating in all critical investment decisions. Cindy's experience encompasses the software, telecommunications and services sectors where she has held progressively responsible positions leading up to several CEO roles. As a member of several early stage executive teams, Cindy has played a lead role in raising more than $50M in venture funding for these companies. Cindy currently represents Outlook Ventures on the boards of Optena and Your Amigo.

Just prior to joining Outlook, Cindy was a Venture Consultant working on a consulting basis with top-tier venture capital firms. Her assignments ranged from interim CEO projects, to new investment due diligence — all within the software, internet services and communications sectors. Projects were completed jointly with firms such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, BA Ventures, Gabriel Venture Partners, 3i, InterWest Ventures, Apex, Bay Partners, MDV, TPG Ventures and USVP and with their portfolio companies including PlaceWare and Nextance.

Before establishing this venture consulting practice Cindy gained almost 20 years of experience in a variety of technology operations and management consulting roles, including as the founder and CEO of Vivant Corporation, an enterprise application company focusing on Workforce Management and Services Procurement solutions. Cindy successfully facilitated the sale to a public enterprise software company in late 2001.

Prior to founding Vivant, Cindy was president and CEO of Acumen, a privately held performance management software company. At Acumen she orchestrated a financial turn-around and managed the creation of a new line of Internet-based applications. These solutions were successfully delivered to tens of thousands of users in Fortune 500 organizations.

Previously, Cindy held sales and marketing management positions in several technology companies including: vice president of marketing at Scopus Technology (an early CRM company later acquired by Siebel) where she positioned the Company for IPO, head of corporate and core product marketing for IDE, a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools vendor, director of strategic/product marketing at Ingres, a leading relational database provider, and sales and marketing management positions at AT&T LongLines and AT&T Information Systems where she was selected as a member of their divestiture planning committee and management development program. Ms. Padnos also worked extensively with both large and small technology companies during her tenure as a management consultant with Arthur D. Little and Booz Allen & Hamilton.

Cindy earned her BA, magna cum laude, at the University of Michigan and received her MBA/MSIA with honors from Carnegie-Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. She serves on the board of directors of Louis Padnos Iron and Metal Company and is a member of the Board of Advisors for Carnegie-Mellons' Tepper School of Business. Cindy has been an active board advisor with early stage companies such as Encover; Digital Fuel and The People Business Network.

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Alan Fisher Venture Partner

A serial entrepreneur, Alan Fisher has founded a portfolio of successful software companies, combining industry know-how with substantial business acumen.

Before joining Outlook Ventures, Fisher was co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Onsale (now Amazon), the Internet's leading value retailer of computers and consumer electronics. He ran the company's engineering and technical operations and also served as the company's Chief Financial Officer in its early years. Onsale went public in 1997 and acquired Egghead.com in 1999 before being acquired by Amazon.

Prior to Onsale, Fisher co-founded and was CEO of Ambia Corporation, now a division of publicly held Infodata Systems, Inc., a developer of electronic document management systems. Ambia was the first developer of technical publishing software specifically designed for the Adobe Acrobat platform. Ambia was successfully acquired by Infodata Systems in 1997.

As President and CEO of Software Partners, Inc., which he co-founded in 1988, Fisher was responsible for the creation of such innovative products as StreetSmart and e.Schwab for Charles Schwab and Company as well as products for SoftKey International and PowerUp! Software. Fisher began his career at Bell Laboratories in 1981 where he worked on commercial videotext systems and joined Teknowledge, an enterprise software company, in 1984 where he developed expert systems software products.

Fisher is a board member of Ironspeed, nSite Software, and Infodata Systems, Inc. (N:INFD) and was formerly a board member of Egghead (N:EGGS), Onsale (N:ONSL), and Fatbrain (N:FATB). He holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri. He is the author of "CASE: Computer-Aided Software Engineering" (John Wiley, 1991). Alan is married with two children and enjoys traveling and numismatics.

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