Meet the Speaker: Brian Smith
Brian Smith serves as the managing director of S3 Ventures, an earlier stage venture capital firm with $170M under management. Brian oversees all of S3′s investments. S3 invests primarily in Texas and the southwest. Brian co-founded the Convergent Investors Fund prior to S3, a $70M early-stage venture capital firm in Texas where he oversaw investments in 10 companies. At age 29, he founded and served as chairman and CEO of Crossroads Systems (Nasdaq: CRDS). He led Crossroads through five rounds of venture, strategic and mezzanine financing and to a successful IPO in 1999. Brian ran Crossroads as a public company for nearly four years. In this role, Brian was an early pioneer in Storage Area Networks (“SANs”), which are industry standard solutions today. For his efforts, he was awarded the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2000. He spent the first seven years of his career in electrical engineering positions holding product development roles within the Technology Group of the IBM Corporation.
Brian earned a BSEE with honors from the University of Cincinnati and an MSEE from Purdue University. He served on the board of Conformative Systems (acquired by Intel), Chicory Systems (acquired by CEVA), Crossroads Systems (Nasdaq: CRDS), LibreDigital (acquired by RRD), Phurnace (acquired by BMC Software), Sipera System (acquired by Avaya, Inc,) and StoredIQ (acquired by IBM). He currently serves on the boards of Alkami, BlueCava, Digby, Gravitant, Invodo, Kimbia, OrthoAccel, Packet Design, Tango Health and TVA Medical.
