The College will be well represented by three alumni – Mark Walsh '76, Steve Ritterbush '68 and John Ciovacco '87 — at the Summit at Tech Valley on Tuesday, April 26, at the Desmond Hotel and Conference Center in Albany.
Walsh, a trustee of the College, will serve as emcee of the event. He is managing partner of Ruxton Ventures LLC, an equity and investment firm with holdings in technology and service companies including Blackboard, Half.com, Day Corp. and IndustryBrains. He served as chairman of VerticalNet. He was also senior vice president of American Online. He founded and managed American Enterprise, the business-to-business division of AOL. Walsh earned his bachelor's from Union, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Ritterbush, a trustee and partner at Fairfax Partners in Vienna, Va., a private equity investment firm, will lead a session titled “Effective Investor Presentations: What the VCs Want to Know.” He is also a judge in “Show Me the Money: $100,000 Business Plan Competition.” He has founded more than 25 companies including ISR Solutions, the world's largest privately held security systems integration company, and AppNet Systems, Inc., a company that provided a variety of web-based services ranging from inventory management to web page design. He earned a master's of science degree in oceanography from the Department of Geophysics at the University of Hawaii, and a master's degree in law and diplomacy and a Ph.D. in international economics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University. Ritterbush was also a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Ciovacco, co-founder (with Ted Eveleth '87) and chairman of Cyclics, is a panelist for a session titled “Advancing Tech Valley: What Will it Take?” moderated by Walsh. Ciovacco and Eveleth recognized the opportunity when GE decided that Cylics resin technology would not fit into its product strategy, and assembled the company's technical and management teams. Cyclics has grown from a 5-person company to one with nearly 100 employees on two continents and a $40 million production plant. It was named The Business Review's Most Promising New Enterprise in 2003, and the Schenectady Chamber of Commerce's Outstanding New Enterprise in 2002.
For further details on the Summit, visit http://www.techvalley.org.